The Digital Paradox: Navigating Innovation and Sustainability | Trainer Slides

Author: Gwendolenn Sharp

The slide deck used by Gwendolenn Sharp during ZMINA:Resilience Capacity Building Webinar #6: The Digital Paradox: Navigating Innovation and Sustainability.

The presentation dismantles the "myth of dematerialisation" with concrete figures on the physical scale of the digital world (equipment mass, users, the hierarchy of carbon-impact sources), before turning to the accelerating footprint of AI and data centres — water and electricity consumption statistics for ChatGPT queries, Ireland's data centres, and image-generation trends. A comparative slide sets everyday digital actions (an email, a ten-minute video, a ChatGPT query) against the far larger footprint of manufacturing a laptop or smartphone, and a further slide compares the emissions of online versus in-person meetings by transport mode. The second half introduces "digital sobriety" as a framework — sufficiency before efficiency, lightness by design, shared responsibility — with examples of moving from individual to collective organisational practice, and closes with a short set of recommendations.