Europe is ready for a Digital Green Deal
The COVID-19 crisis has boosted digitalisation of many aspects of our daily life throughout Europe: from smart working to distance education and the use of digital platforms for food delivery. Digital tools and data are playing an important role in the health response to COVID-19, from tracing the virus with contact tracing apps to the use of data to identify outbreaks and assess the impact on jobs and the environment.
The more digitalisation goes on, the more we must give it a direction. The moment for doing that is NOW!
On 15th December 2020 the EU commission presented its Digital Service Act – a kind of a new constitution for digitalisation in Europe. New regulation for platforms, digital contents and data are part of it.
Data is the raw material of the digital economy and an intelligent use of data is of great public interest. To regain democratic control, strong rules will beneeded such as stricter antitrust rules that link data privacy and competition, governance models such as "data trusts", and fostering the development of decentralized and privacy-enhancing technologies.
But, we need not only such a new constitution for the internet, we also need new specifications for the basic equipment of all infrastructures and devices that make the access to all digital data possible.
Data centres, digital infrastructure and devices require enormous amounts of resources and energy. As the number of devices grows, consumption balloons. If we don't act now, the estimated energy consumption will cause us to significantly backslide on environment and climate goals.
Therefore we should promote a "digital green deal" because it is about using digital technologies to attain both social and environmental sustainability.
Taking over European leadership is this sense, creates a new chance – especially now, that the tech cold war between the US and China risks creating a global technology-industry split. Make EU a frontrunner and establish sustainable digitalisation as a European trademark beyond the consumer-driven silicon valley approach and authoritarian models of digitalisation.
That is the vision we have worked for during the six months of the German Council Presidency. There are many issues to tackle, here are three examples:
The environmental data of all EU member states, compiled in a Green Deal data space, could make it easier to implement the EU's ambitious environmental policies. It could also facilitate using digital technologies as a driver for innovation and for the ecological transformation, which lies ahead of us.
Secondly, a "digital product passport" would create transparency along global value chains around the social and ecological rucksack of a product and enable consumers, citizens as well as companies to take environmental action. Public IT tenders should also include ethical digital standards to preserve people's digital rights, data sovereignty, openness and interoperability, leveraging EU common data infrastructures such as GaiaX.
Thirdly, digital technologies should be environmentally sustainable. This will require rules to reduce the energy consumption of data centres and increase their energy efficiency. Provisions to extend the operating life of digital hardware are also needed, in particular for smartphones and other smart devices. This applies equally to production, design and use.
The European Commission, like us, sees a need for action at the interface between the environment and digitalisation. With the European Green Deal and its digital strategy, the Commission has made proposals that the German Council Presidency is pushing now. At the end of this month EU member states will pass council conclusions for a green digitalisation and for an action plan to significantly reduce the amount of disposed ICT products by 2025, climate neutral data centres by 2030 and a digital product passport to provide more information on a product's components, reuse, repair and recycling possibilities The Commission will develop pilot projects on that starting with car batteries.
It is time for Europe to put forward a model of European technological sovereignty: a new digital humanism, a technological revolution for people and the ecological transition. For us, this includes setting worldwide standards for sustainable and democratic digitalisation in all its variety – that will benefit both people and the environment and become a new hallmark of Europe.
This op-ed by Minister Svenja Schulze and Francesca Bria was published in the Italian newspaper Il sole 24 Ore and in LinkedIn on December 15 2020.