Book excerpt: Our digital lives have a significant carbon footprint Welcome to the digital age, which isn’t the sci-fi utopia we were promised. Our lives are increasingly digital, yet most people never consider the energy it takes to store, deliver, and consume the masses of data required to make the internet function. Whether we’re content consumers using retail websites and banking apps or content creators making video calls or posting on social media, the energy used for digital content has a shocking carbon footprint. Sustainable Content explores how we can measure and mitigate these environmental impacts. It delivers a foundational knowledge of sustainability, the effects of content creation and consumption, and why all of this increasingly matters to business management and the planet as a whole. Author and content strategist Alisa Bonsignore has built a career out of helping companies design sustainable content, and in this book, she shares her insights on: • Assessing the environmental impact of our data • Measuring emissions of any form of digital content, from emails to video meetings • Understanding the accelerating impacts of AI • Adding value at work with a sustainability focus • Identifying solutions for change • Mitigating the carbon footprint of data by creating more sustainable content Sustainable Content is an approachable and actionable guide for thoughtful content creation and consumption. Together, we can improve usability, reduce costs, and boost audience satisfaction.