Last week, the Internet celebrated its 40th birthday! Forty glorious years that saw not just the transition from ARPANet to the now popular Internet but also Web 2.0 and what not! The Internet has been a revolution–in the making! The Internet that we know of today has been around for a little over a decade. That is also the time period when awareness and action on the “global” climate crisis has been phenomenal. And the link, evident!

According to the Internet Governance Forum, Internet consumes up to one trillion kilowatt hours of electricity per year, amounting to around 5% of the world’s total electricity consumption. The ‘tools’ of the IT sector are also manufactured using metals of various kinds. So the question remains, can Internet really help solve the climate crisis? The answer, on behalf of a generation grown up with the Internet, a firm Yes!

Here are five ways how Internet is helping fight climate change:

1. By saving paper: Thanks to the Internet, a major chunk of work has shifted from paper to online. Emails have always been popular, eBooks are gaining popularity, transactions take place online and nearly everything that was on paper (including newspapers) is now digital. This has surely saved a lot of paper and the trees, rather forests, that are felled in order to manufacture it.

2. By making travel avoidable: The Internet is now a virtual super-market.This is just one aspect of it. Virtual Conferencing may be perhaps the biggest contribution of the Internet towards solving the climate crisis. So, not just travel to the local market is made unnecessary, video conferencing enables corporates to attend a multi-stakeholder meeting in another part of the world from the comforts of their cubicles! The tremendous potential this has in emission reductions has been little explored.

3. By uniting the world: The Internet has transformed this world into a global village thus redefining words like neighbor, network and even friend! It has also been a tool and a symbol of global democracy! The sheer numbers that can now be put behind a campaign could never have been imagined fifty years ago. The climate movement has no doubt benefited from this and with the ‘one world, one climate’ message that Internet gets across.

4. By decentralizing offices and workplaces: With broadband going broader, there has been an increasing trend of ‘working from home’ or from well connected hubs. What this will mean in the near future can be better imagined than written. A tremendous amount of pressure could be lifted from the infrastructure sector and its environmental implications.

5. By laying the foundation of the IT Sector: The Information Technology sector is a remarkable one that has been able to provide jobs to a large number of youth in all parts of the world. It is an industry that has information as its raw material and no deliberate harmful by-products. The two major ways where it contributes to global warming and environmental degradation are the energy consumption and e-waste generation. However, usually concentrated in clusters of IT Parks, this is an ideal sector to intervene with large scale solar solutions.

In a Web 2.0 Summit last year, former US Vice President Al Gore began his speech by advocating that an Internet revolution carrying Barack Obama to the White House should now focus its power on stopping Earth’s climate crisis. Nelson Mandela once said, “Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great.” Our generations is facing with an hitherto unknown crisis and we have the tool to fight it and save our Planet. How we use it to solve the crisis will be the difference between greatness and annihilation.

Reprinted with permission from EcoWorldly