In preparing this Digital Policy Agenda for the Environment, the BMU has broken new ground. At the re:publica 2019 conference, the Ministry presented its key points for a digital policy agenda for the environment and initiated a broad participation process. In autumn 2019, the BMU initiated an unusual work process, the environmental workshop, with over 200 renowned experts.

In order to fully tap the potential of digitalisation for environmental protection, climate action and resource conservation, its own ecological footprint must be as low as possible. This is far from the case in reality. The growth in the development and use of digital technologies also increases energy and resource consumption.

There is no one single digitalisation process, rather there are different sectors, areas of life and fields of action where digitalisation is taking place. The Digital Policy Agenda for the Environment covers four fields particularly relevant to digitalisation. 

The Digital Policy Agenda for the Environment contains over 70 measures that combine digitalisation and environmental protection. Of these measures, some are already underway and others are being initiated with the Digital Agenda. Other measures will be implemented at a later stage in the future and are to be developed next.

Modern people of today live a digitalised world. We post videos on social media, order clothes online and send some of these orders back. At work, we exchange files on a global scale. All this impacts heavily on the environment, because in order to do these things we need communication networks and high-performance cloud services. Behind the scenes are data centres all over the world consuming large quantities of electricity. The devices themselves are also problematic for the environment.