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Digital sustainability

Principles and practices

This book is 100% completeLast updated on 2026-07-17
András Ács Pedersen and Jesper Balslev

Digital Sustainability: From Principles to Practice shows how digital technologies shape our environmental and societal future, and how we can design them responsibly. It equips students and professionals with concrete tools to build more sustainable software, systems, and digital solutions. Less theory for its own sake, more competence for the reality we’re about to enter.

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About

About

About the Book

Digital Sustainability: Principles and Practices is a field guide for anyone who designs, builds, or manages digital solutions and wants to do so as sustainably as possible.

Structured in three parts, the book begins by grounding you in the fundamentals of sustainable computing. It defines key concepts, introduces systems and critical thinking tools, and maps the environmental and social impacts of today’s digital technologies.

It then turns theory into action, with practical chapters on green-minded design, carbon-aware coding, low-impact infrastructure, and humane user experiences.

Finally, the book steps back to explore broader perspectives such as digital degrowth, before handing the baton to you, the practitioner, through checklists and best-practice templates in the appendix.

Read it to understand the stakes, master the methods, and bring genuinely sustainable decisions into every digital project you touch.

👉 Written by practice-oriented academics, the book is for learning, teaching and applying sustainability principles across IT and digital disciplines.

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Computer ScienceData ScienceComputers and Programming

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

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Author

About the Authors

András Ács Pedersen

András Ács Pedersen is Associate Lecturer in IT & Digital Communication at Zealand Academy of Technologies and Business. His research links cybersecurity, sustainable computing, social and digital value creation, turning complex technical challenges into actionable strategies for a greener digital future. Through teaching, textbooks, and frequent speaking engagements, he equips tomorrow’s professionals to design, build, and manage digital solutions, that are both resilient and also sustainable.

Jesper Balslev

Ph.d. in philosophy of technology, author and researcher. Docent at the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology. Has an ambition to always build more critical capacity in the IT-sector.

Contents

Table of Contents

0. Introduction

  1. Chapter overview

Part one: Why digital sustainability?

1. Setting the stage: Fundamental concepts of sustainability and digital development

  1. Why is sustainability urgently important right now?
  2. Fundamental sustainability concepts
  3. Environmental aspects of sustainability: Energy and materials
  4. Organizations shape our sustainable future
  5. Societal - and individual - aspects of sustainability
  6. A more sustainable digital future
  7. Bringing it together: Key insights from this chapter

2. Critical thinking and systems theory

  1. In this chapter
  2. Systems theory
  3. System interactions: Video streaming as an example
  4. What exactly is a system?
  5. Emergent systems
  6. Designed systems
  7. Digital twins
  8. Systems thinking and critical thinking
  9. Ask questions and think critically
  10. Digital systems vs. ecosystems: Differences, similarities and synergies
  11. E-commerce as an example of a system model
  12. Network theory can complement systems theory
  13. Systems were traditionally compared to machines
  14. Bringing it together: Key insights from this chapter

3. The impact of information technology on environment and society

  1. How Earth’s orbit became polluted so fast
  2. The physical side of information technology
  3. Hardware: A sustainable lifecycle?
  4. Network and cloud: Challenges and opportunities
  5. Software: Key sustainability aspects
  6. How can we make information technology more sustainable?
  7. Bringing it together: Key insights from this chapter

Part two: How to work with digital sustainability?

4. Digital design with sustainability

  1. Design that does good – in the long term
  2. Approaches for sustainable design
  3. User experience (UX) design
  4. User interfaces and interaction design 
  5. Nudging: Guiding sustainable user behavior
  6. Bringing it together: Key insights from this chapter

5. Sustainability as a guiding principle in software development

  1. Software development life cycle (SDLC)
  2. Energy efficiency of software
  3. Ecolabeling of software
  4. Sustainable system development
  5. Bringing it together: Key insights from this chapter

6. (Not quite) sustainable hardware and IT operations

  1. (Not quite) sustainable electronics products
  2. Building less unsustainable computers
  3. Fairphone, a more fair smartphone
  4. On the road to sustainable information technology
  5. Thought experiment - real, sustainable computers
  6. Lo-fi computing, low carbon computing, collapse informatics
  7. More sustainable IT operations
  8. 9 recommendations for companies’ green IT transition
  9. SustainableIT: standards for environmental, social and corporate sustainability
  10. Bringing it together: Key insights from this chapter

7. Wellness, well-being and digitalization

  1. What is the problem with digitalization?
  2. The flip side of digitalization: Examples of unhappiness in a technological world
  3. Other policy focal points for social sustainability
  4. CSRD: Requirements for documentation of sustainability efforts
  5. Sustainability in practice
  6. Digital well-being
  7. AI and well-being: Companions, content and care
  8. The potential for innovative, socially sustainable IT
  9. Socially sustainable UX in practice
  10. Actions from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
  11. Bringing it together: Key insights from this chapter

Part three: Sustainability in digitalized organisations

8. Digital degrowth

  1. Eroom’s law
  2. Low carbon and sustainable computing
  3. Computing within Limits
  4. Permacomputing
  5. A solar-powered website
  6. Convivial computing
  7. Junkyard computing
  8. Open source and digital sovereignty
  9. Degrowth and the AI boom
  10. Bringing it together: Key insights from this chapter

9. Governing sustainability in digital projects

  1. Why governance matters in digital sustainability
  2. From profits to purpose
  3. By IT and of IT
  4. The power of storytelling
  5. Sustainable digital entrepreneurship
  6. Sustainability by IT: Cases from the European twin transition
  7. Leadership in sustainable digital projects
  8. Barriers and pitfalls
  9. Future prospects for the digital and green transition
  10. Bringing it together: Key insights from this chapter

10. Closing thoughts: Towards a greener, healthier and brighter digital future

Appendix: Best practices for sustainable IT and digitalization

  1. A. Overarching design principles for sustainable digital solutions
  2. B. Sustainability principles for the use of hardware
  3. C. Sustainability principles for network and cloud
  4. D. Sustainability principles for software

Bibliography

Thank you!

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Causes

Causes Supported

The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.

The NetBSD Foundation, Inc. NetBSD

Of course it runs NetBSD

https://www.netbsd.org
NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices.
The NetBSD Project is an international collaborative effort of a large group of people, to produce a freely available and redistributable UNIX-like operating system, NetBSD. In addition to our own work, NetBSD contains a variety of other free software, including 4.4BSD Lite2 from the University of California, Berkeley. One of the primary focuses of the NetBSD project has been to make the base OS highly portable. This has resulted in NetBSD being ported to a large number of hardware platforms. NetBSD is also interoperable, implementing many standard APIs and network protocols, and emulating many other systems' ABIs. The NetBSD Foundation is incorporated in the United States as a tax-exempt corporation (under Section 501(c)(3) of the US Internal Revenue Code) that devotes itself to the traditional goals and spirit of the NetBSD Project and owns the trademark of the word “NetBSD”.

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