Technology permeates every facet of daily life, and nature permeates every facet of the tech sector. Semiconductor manufacturing alone consumes more than one trillion litres of freshwater annually, plus tons of critical metals and minerals, such as rare earths. Data centers draw more than 60 gigawatts (GW) of energy annually, enough to power California’s peak needs. Discarded technology hardware accounts for 60 billion kilograms of e-waste annually, with less than a quarter recycled. Tech’s nature footprint is sizable, but so is its reliance on natural resources.
Why tech must act now on nature risks and opportunities
To ensure future success, tech companies must act swiftly to address their impacts on natural systems and their dependencies on natural resources. Failure to do so may threaten tech’s near-term license to operate and long-term resilience. Since May 2024, $64 billion of data center projects in the United States have been blocked or delayed due to local concerns, mostly about demands on natural resources and power. The resistance does not necessarily represent efforts to protect nature, but rather the rising competition for evermore scarce natural resources.
But it’s not all risk management. Nature-positive strategies can also open up new financial opportunities — from the use of recovered and recycled metals for new products to cost savings from reduced consumption of power and water.
Seven actions to accelerate a nature-positive transition in the tech sector
In our report, "Nature Positive: Role Of The Technology Sector," we summarize tech’s key impacts and dependencies on nature and recommend seven priority actions that leaders in semiconductor manufacturing, data centers, and hardware can pursue to start tech on its nature-positive transition:
1. Push forward resilient and restorative water use: This includes assessing supply scarcity before site development, designing for efficiency, adopting closed-loop systems to cool servers and facilities with recycled water, and investing in watershed restoration.
2. Mitigate pollution and elevate circularity: Executives need to adopt cleaner processes, reduce reliance on virgin inputs, design products for longevity and recyclability, support programs that recover value from e-waste, and restore affected ecosystems.
3. Target non-power operational and embodied emissions: Among the things to prioritize is the prevention of emission leakage, the deployment of abatement technologies, and the investment in credible offset and removal schemes that deliver co-benefits.
4. Promote land stewardship and restoration: Companies should prioritize brownfield development, conduct biodiversity risk assessments, integrate native landscaping and green infrastructure, and invest in habitat restoration.
5. Power operations sustainably: An early step should be increasing low- and zero-carbon power, energy-efficient computing and cooling, dynamic energy management, and efficient building design to minimize upstream impacts from electricity supply.
6. Engage with the supply chain: Companies should give preference to suppliers with robust sustainability certifications. They can also choose to use low-impact materials and resource-efficient processes and establish clear biodiversity and water stewardship expectations across the value chain.
7. Support nature-positive community efforts and policymaking: This would include transparent reporting of nature-related impacts to appropriate authorities through credible frameworks, working with policymakers to develop sustainable nature-positive policies, and engaging with customers to help them understand nature impacts.
Tech has always been a consistently innovative sector that has been a critical contributor to the entire economy. Now, it has an opportunity to lead on its own and the economy’s nature-positive, too.
