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The impact of information and communication technology on GHG emissions: how green are virtual worlds?

Information and communication technology (ICT) has the potential to either increase or decrease global anthropogenic GHG emissions. Through its various life cycle phases, ICT now represents a rapidly growing source of GHG emissions from the energy and manufacturing sectors, but through its use to avoid emissions in other sectors, in particular those of the transport sector, ICT also has the potential to significantly reduce emissions. Here we explore the potential of so-called ‘virtual world’ technologies to provide a substitute for physical meetings, highlighting the resulting GHG emission savings that can be achieved. These virtual world technologies exemplify the double-edged nature of ICT in climate change mitigation, as their use may generate significant direct emissions through energy use, while, at the same time, reduce emissions from other sources, such as business travel. Actual and potential use, of virtual world technology (VWT) in a nonrandom sample of four large organizations was assessed. For two of these organizations a quantitative assessment of the impact of VWT on net GHG emissions from a specific event was carried out. Subsequent to this, a qualitative assessment of the barriers to increased VWT was made for the other two organizations. We found that, in the two quantitative case studies, VWT was successfully used to substitute physical meetings with virtual ones and that the extent of avoided transport-related GHG emissions was several times greater than the direct emissions generated by the VWT in its use phase. However, our qualitative assessments of current and potential VWT use in the two additional organizations indicated the existence of significant technical and cultural barriers to more widespread use. We conclude that increased use of VWT can potentially lead to significant net GHG emissions savings – primarily via reduced business travel. However, there remain a number of barriers, such as low levels of user engagement, which must be overcome if uptake of VWT at the scale required for globally-significant emissions reductions is to be achieved.