From the course: Digital Sustainability: How to Reduce Your Digital Footprint

Awareness of our own digital impact

- In order for you to start helping to prevent the impacts of your use of digital technologies on the environment, the first thing you need to do is to become aware of all your digital activities and how much of a carbon footprint they are generating. Once you know what your current level of impact is, you can start to design a plan, strategies, goals, and daily actions that will help you take even better care of the environment. We talk a lot about how digital asset impact environment. Now, let's look at your impact on the environment. Start by considering all of your devices. Which kind of devices do you have and how many? Do the manufacturers have any environmental policies in place? Do you switch them off when not in use? Then look at how you use those devices. How long do you spend on them? How often do you use them? Concerning the apps you use, do you have applications like the GPS running even when you are not using them? Do you open a lot of tabs when browsing? Do you make a lot of searches that could be avoided by bookmarking pages you visit often? When you analyze your emailing activities, what proportion of them are really necessary? With how many people do you share information? And who are they? How often do you delete information? Now take a few moments to answer these questions and you will be able to understand your digital impact and create a plan to reduce your digital carbon footprint. You can download and use the exercise file that I share with you in this course.

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