The inaugural meeting was welcomed by Vice-Chancellor and President of Loughborough University, Professor Nick Jennings, and chaired by Professor Graham Hitchen.
The SAG and its members play an essential role in continuing Loughborough’s pioneering leadership in digital decarbonisation and its commitment to addressing the environmental impact of digital activities – often overlooked in sustainability discussions.
Members of the Digital Decarbonisation SAG include:
- National Physical Laboratory (NPL)
- Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- World Economic Forum (WEF)
- Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl)
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
- Information Records Management Society (IRMS)
- the House of Lords.
Discussing the importance of the SAG, Loughborough Business School academic, Professor Tom Jackson said: “Transforming the digital ecosystem by changing opinions, practices and policies necessitates collaboration, working with others to influence and instigate real change.
“The Strategic Advisory Group will play a critical role in this endeavour, bringing together leading industrialists and policymakers from a range of organisations to contribute their expertise to the mission of decarbonising our digital ecosystem.”
Fellow digital decarbonisation lead, Professor Ian Hodgkinson added: “By uniting academic knowledge, technical and analytical expertise, SAG members are helping to lead the way to address digital divides from energy-hungry infrastructure, standardise CO2 measurement for digital practices, and future-proof innovation with sustainability in mind.
“We want to enable future solutions where technology, environmental stewardship and user well-being converge to help meet the goal of net-zero by 2050.”
A core pillar of the research programme is to foster new talent and interdisciplinary approaches to tackle this pressing issue. In addition to their thought leadership and contributions to scaling the research programme, the SAG will play a key role in helping the Design Group’s five doctoral researchers drive the next frontier of digital decarbonisation research.
The funding from the Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarships has been a critical accelerator of the digital decarbonisation research programme and the scaling and growth of Loughborough’s pioneering work in this area.
“This essential work seeks to steer outputs that have real meaning within the physical world, not only to meet environmental targets, but also to drive effective and relevant computational and data storage requirements. This approach is paramount to ensure the United Kingdom and the wider world can continue to thrive within ever increasing data centric enabled economic prosperity, without further recourse to unrealistic and untenable resource usage”, commented Professor Patrick J Baker, Head of Science for the Royal Air Force.
Following the inaugural meeting, Professor Neil Stansfield, Head of Resilience and Security at the National Physical Laboratory, added: “A focus on decarbonisation is a priority for the UK and as a leading National Laboratory, NPL is fully committed to this initiative. As the Government has detailed critical technology areas such as AI, quantum, future computing and comms, and particularly the convergence of these, there is a real opportunity to play a leading role, both nationally and internationally, through digital decarbonisation.
"Through this programme we see a role in developing skills nationally, supporting the supply chain, and leading in developing standards nationally and globally.”