At the first UN Climate Change Conference in 1995, digital technology was not part of the agenda. At the time, the Internet and the World Wide Web were used by less than 1% of the world’s population and the digital industry’s environmental impact was hardly considered.
Today, everything has changed. Collectively, 166 leading tech companies generated nearly 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2022—a total that would place them in the league of the top 25 emitting countries. And 10 of those leading companies accounted for almost 1% of global electricity consumption.
