The Digital Paradox: Navigating Innovation and Sustainability | ZMINA:Resilience Capacity Building

Aims

This capacity building session challenged the pervasive assumption that digital technologies are inherently "green" — weightless, invisible, and ecologically neutral. By presenting the concrete physical, energetic, and geopolitical costs of the digital world, the session aimed to equip cultural organisations with a clear-eyed understanding of their digital footprint and a practical framework — digital sobriety — for making more responsible choices. Rather than advocating for digital abstinence, it positioned the cultural sector as a space where individual, organisational, and collective responsibility can meaningfully intersect.

The session aimed to help participants:

• Understand the concept of dematerialisation as a myth: why digital infrastructure has very concrete physical and environmental costs,
• Grasp the scale of the digital sector's environmental impact — in terms of carbon, water, energy, and material extraction,
• Identify the four main sources of digital environmental impact and their relative weight, with manufacturing as the dominant factor,
• Understand the growing environmental and geopolitical implications of data centres and AI expansion,
• Apply the three principles of digital sobriety — sufficiency before efficiency, lightness by design, and shared responsibility — to organisational practice,
• Use a practical checklist framework, organised around four thematic areas, to audit and improve digital practices within their organisations,
• Situate digital sustainability within a broader framework of systemic and collective action — moving beyond individual guilt towards structural change.

Trainer

Gwendolenn Sharp is the founder of The Green Room, a France-based non-profit organisation specialising in environmental and social change strategies for the music and broader cultural sector. Since 2011, The Green Room has worked with cultural institutions, festivals, environmental NGOs, and networks across Europe and internationally. Gwendolenn brings expertise in sustainability strategy, carbon management, and practical training for cultural organisations, and has collaborated extensively with On the Move — co-developing the decision-making tool for green mobility and contributing to the SHIFT eco-certification framework for cultural networks.

Content

The webinar moved through five interconnected parts: a brief introduction and session framing through a warm-up poll, a systematic dismantling of the dematerialisation myth, a deep dive into data centres and global inequity, a comparative framework for understanding which individual actions actually matter, and a practical framework for digital sobriety that closed with a summary of collective responsibility. Throughout, Gwendolenn combined data, concrete examples, and a frank acknowledgement that digital sustainability requires structural change as much as individual behaviour.

1. The Myth of Dematerialisation
2. Data Centres, AI and Global Inequity
3. What Actions Actually Matter
4. Digital Sobriety: Principles and Practical Tools
5. Shared Responsibility

The session was held on May 27, 2026 in English.