August 13, 2024

From Clicks to Campaigns: Nurturing a Sustainable Digital Ecosystem

While researching for the next Curious Minds blog, last month’s Plastic Free July campaign caught our attention. It made us return to the question we often ask ourselves: How, as a remote health communications agency, can we improve our environmental impact when we don’t produce physical goods?

In 2024 many see traditional marketing practices as simply ‘pollution’, paper leaflets being mass produced or full-page adverts created for magazines, while the digital marketing space is increasingly described as an ecosystem – a vast network of interconnected components that create the digital landscape we see today.

However, while the digital space doesn’t cause as much ecological harm, this doesn’t mean it cannot impact the environment. The internet itself generates 3.7% of global emissions, the equivalent of all the air traffic in the world.

Paired with the fact that 7.1 billion unwanted emails are sent every day, emitting 28,000 tonnes of CO2 globally, it’s no secret that digital activities have a lot of room to be more sustainable. This blog focuses on our corner of the ecosystem and asks how as a healthcare communications agency can we positively impact this digital space, through the work we do and the things we create, challenging our own assumptions about the environment and sustainability.

This blog is part of a series that highlights our ongoing efforts at Curious Health and our annual Impact Report will highlight the tangible steps we’re taking to ensure a sustainable future. We will also explore environmental justice and its relationship to health inequalities, offering insights into how these issues intersect with our work and how health communications can make a difference. Through this series, we aim to share how sustainability influences our approach and the actions we take every day as an agency.

Prescribing Change: The Urgent Need for Sustainability in Healthcare

Patients are at the heart of everything we do and the demand for sustainability is growing from the ground up. A 2019 study found that 94% of patients believe that a hospital’s environmental sustainability program is necessary for overall better operations. Five years later and these concerns have only intensified, with around two-thirds (62%) of HCPs maintaining that the climate crisis has completely altered the landscape of the patients they treat. More general concerns around the environment are having a direct impact on clinical decisions, as 41% of HCPs now consider environmental factors when prescribing treatments and 52% saying they’re more likely to prescribe a product if they know it’s environmentally friendly. It’s clear that the patients we treat have the environment at the forefront of their minds, so it’s vital that it is at the forefront of ours.

The Digital Ecosystem: Where Do We Come In?

Sustainability and environmentalism are (rightly) at the heart of everyone’s work, however, this makes it easy to get lost in eco buzzwords and ESGs. It’s now more important than ever to recognise how we individually impact the digital ecosystem and how we can collaborate to make it stronger and more environmentally friendly. From creating campaigns to sending emails, everything we do impacts the environment, even if it is digital.

An interesting statistic from 2019 highlights that if each adult in the UK sent one less ‘thank you’ email a day the country could reduce its carbon output by over 16,433 tonnes.

It may seem like a very small impact, but if everyone made an effort to stop sending one-line emails, or used Teams more often for internal communications, we could save emissions with a simple click of a button.

As a digital communications agency, we are constantly creating online assets for our clients and ourselves. Take websites for example, a necessary and useful tool for any company or brand today, however when scrolling these pages, it’s safe to say the carbon emissions of the site aren’t weighing heavy on your mind. Interestingly, the average website produces 4.61 grams of CO2 for every visit. If a website has 10,000 views per month, it will emit 553 kilograms of CO2 per year, equivalent to a round-trip flight from London Heathrow to Lisbon. There are now tools which allow you to enter yours or your company’s website to see how carbon-efficient it is and it’s eye-opening. It will rate the page against every other website it has scanned, give you a score and identify how you can make it greener. The Eco-Friendly Web Alliance has set a target for carbon per page to be one gramme, although still not neutral, it “serves as a practical starting point for carbon reduction efforts.” As a communications agency, if we have this goal in mind when creating websites and digital assets, we have the opportunity and the power to make our corner of the digital landscape a better place.

If we’re consciously trying to be more carbon-neutral and openly talking about the environment, we hope this will have a knock-on effect on those around us. If we can speak transparently about the carbon footprint of digital campaigns with our clients and suppliers, we are already working towards a greener digital space. AI therefore is a vital part of this dialogue, as it has spun everyone’s work on its head, so it’s essential that we have a transparent approach to how to use the tool.

AI’s Dark Footprint: The Hidden Environmental Cost

Artificial Intelligence is the ‘it girl’ of the digital space at the moment, everyone is talking about it. However, it doesn’t only exist online, AI has a big impact on the real world as well. Google recently reported that its carbon emissions in 2023 were 48% higher than in 2019, due to the energy demands from AI servers. A study from 2019 also found that just training the ChatGPT-2 model emitted about 300,000kg of CO2, the equivalent of 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing. We’re now on the 4th model of the AI tool and the carbon emissions have only grown. While it seems to have a positive effect on our lives it’s integral that we understand the detrimental impact AI is having on the environment and people. Last year Microsoft reported that its water consumption jumped by 34% between 2021 and 2022, to 6.4 million cubic meters, the size of 2,500 Olympic swimming pools. These servers and data centres require so much energy and water just to cool them down daily, and it doesn’t just take its toll on the environment, humans are affected too. In a heartbreaking story from a town in Texas, the real-world effects of huge online servers (in this case bitcoin mining) are glaringly obvious. The noise from these large mines is having a direct impact on the health of those living near them. Residents report heart problems, vertigo, nausea and a whole host of illnesses that started around the same time as the daily roaring of the data centres.

It’s easy to seem helpless when presented with these scary statistics and stories, however educating ourselves is the vital first step to tackling the data. For example, not overusing AI by mindlessly asking questions, instead using it effectively on a value basis could help reduce how much energy is needed to power the tool. Again, it may seem so small it’s almost pointless, however, if we all considered the environmental impact of all aspects of our technology, including AI, we would start to limit it. Also developing a code of practice on how to use AI responsibly and efficiently goes some way in addressing the larger scale issues that artificial intelligence presents.

Small Steps, Big Impact: How Digital Comms Agencies Can Drive Environmental Change

At our last agency get-together, we spoke about these issues and how we can do our best to really effect change, even as a team of just six. Our Impact Report details these steps in more depth however here are some simple, easy to act on steps that we do every day that can help transform our small part of the ecosystem:

Remembering to switch off laptops and monitors for lunch or the end of the day.

Using a Teams group chat instead of an email chain to avoid clogging up email inboxes.

Educating ourselves on the latest environmental news and recent developments in the tech world.

Making sure we use public transport for co-working days or agency get-togethers.

Using Green hosting for our websites and the websites we help to create.

Tracking our carbon footprint through Ecologi to ensure we’re staying on top of our actions and goals.

Staying curious on how we can keep becoming more and more sustainable as an agency.

By sharing our journey and insights, we aim to inspire and empower others to embrace more sustainable practices.

Curious about how to make your business more sustainable? Or looking to make your campaigns even greener? The team at Curious Health have expertise in several different therapy areas and experience in crafting unique and community-led campaigns that have an impact. Get in touch for a chat by emailing [email protected]