Sustainability challenges of Guardian’s digital expansion

Submitted by: The Two Sides Team February 10, 2012

This article, written by Christopher Hodgson and Jo Confino, appeared on The Guardian’s website on 9 February.

How the Guardian is building partnerships and collaborations to start the complex task of understanding and reducing its digital footprint

The technological revolution sweeping through the media industry is spurring Guardian News & Media (GNM) to go through a fundamental reassessment of its supply chain management.

The Guardian has over many years developed its approach to the responsible purchasing of the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of paper it uses to print its newspapers. But just as that system is running smoothly, the business now needs to focus attention on its growing digital impacts. This is an issue that is going to become increasingly important given the company’s commitment to be digital-first, which will roughly equate to 80% of revenues coming from guardian.co.uk and the rest from printed products. Quantifying and mitigating these impacts is already proving to be challenging for a number of reasons. One is that it is difficult to get quality information from suppliers about the environmental footprint and social justice aspects of the digital products and services they sell. GNM is by no means alone in finding progress difficult. Ronan Dunne, the chief executive of telecommunications group 02, said only this week in an interview with the Guardian that the ICT industry has been hiding behind the myth that it is “carbon light” and therefore has been under little pressure to be accountable for its emissions.

By contrast, GNM’s paper suppliers have been under consistent pressure from NGOs such as Greenpeace and WWF for years so the major players, such as UPM, have built responsible procurement and reporting into their structures. What has also helped is that GNM has for many years employed a dedicated paper purchaser, who knows the industry inside out and has developed deep relationships through the supply chain. Given that GNM deals with only a few major players in the newsprint and magazine paper market, it has also been fairly easy to create and manage a single generic suppliers’ audit questionnaire that gives the necessary data to set appropriate targets and be able to accurately measure performance.

The digital world, however, is more diverse and complex and there is no single person in the company who can match the paper purchaser’s level of insight. Guardian News & Media faces other hurdles. While the physicality of huge reels of paper and the known risks of deforestation made it relatively easy to engage senior managers in discussions around our environmental footprint, it is harder for them to relate to our digital impacts. Some progress has been made with issues related to digital already recognised at board level through the sustainability objectives and targets of the directors of the digital development, technology and commercial departments.  However, the organisation’s current ability to systematically consider risks and opportunities is severely limited by the lack of specific knowledge and the absence of a clear framework for applying this in operational decision making.

It is also not clear where the boundaries of responsibility lie: Is it the computer hardware makers, the networks, the Guardian or the consumer who logs on to our website?  If the answer is all of the above, how is it possible to account for these and separate them out in any meaningful way? Lots of questions and precious few answers, so why bother to try to pick a way through this minefield?  Well, the Guardian’s vision is to be a leader on sustainability within the media industry and as part of that, we have a commitment to move towards becoming carbon positive. This involves not only maximising the influence of our editorial content but also minimising the negative impacts of our operations and business activities. There are also a number of risks and opportunities, related to the social and environmental consequences of being ‘digital-first’ that may influence our long-term financial viability: For example, as a digital-first organisation, the Guardian will be increasingly reliant on a global network of data centres for delivering its services. The company therefore needs to think about the implications of increased digital energy demands and how resilient the digital-first model is to the possibility of energy blackouts.

The business also needs to be aware of future operational costs, legislative requirements, and reputational risks.  Clearly, we are not going to be able to answer all the questions on our own, which is why we are building a number of partnerships and collaborative ventures. For example, GNM is a leading member of the Digital Sustainability Group, which is working with other media groups such as BBC, Trinity Mirror, Pearson Group and Reed Elsevier to understand what sustainable digital media deliver actually means. GNM has also teamed up with the Sympact project, led by Chris Preist of the University of Bristol, which is conducting ground-breaking research in this area, using the Guardian as its guinea pig. It is attempting to calculate the energy footprint of the different digital products that GNM offers across the whole delivery lifecycle – the data centres around the world that hold the content, the network equipment that gets it to the audience, and the computer, tablet or phone it is viewed on.  Sympact is carrying out the work to such a fine level of detail that it will be able to give the footprint for an individual person’s behaviour, based on where they are in the world, when and for how long they access the service, how they use it and what they view it on. The first iteration of its work will be presented to GNM managers from across the company this week.

In addition to the SYMPACT project, GNM is also hosting engineering doctorate student Stephen Wood from the Centre for Environmental Strategy at the University of Surrey, who is researching whether it is possible to reduce environmental impacts at the design stage. His work so far has been on understanding the form and function of the Guardian’s digital products and creating a set of tools to be able to measure the environmental consequences of different design decisions. In part, this work relies on the knowledge gained by the SYMPACT project.  Wood gives a good sense of why this work is proving so difficult: “This analysis must extend beyond the efficient delivery of a single page: Although the servers and devices used in delivery produce the direct impact on the natural world, energy use in this system is ultimately driven by people interacting with digital products. In turn, understanding these interactions has involved getting to grips with the complexity of contemporary digital media products and the many different technical and professional disciplines that come together to deliver a typical Guardian web page.”

GNM’s ambition is to develop an holistic life-cycle model for digital media products, create sustainability criteria and metrics for digital news media products, develop recommendations and tools for stakeholders as well as encouraging innovation in digital sustainability. To achieve these is going to take hard work and progress is likely to be slow and erratic. But the prize is worth fighting for.

Christopher Hodgson is Environmental and Sustainability Manager for Guardian News & Media

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