Telecentres often provide net access in rural areas

If you want to hold a conference about the pressing need to do something about the world's environmental problems, then a city which is slowly sinking beneath the sea as a result of pollution and nearby industrial development would seem an obvious venue.

And if you want to talk about the need to move the world's economic system away from the idea that we can just do what we like with the planet, a city which has sacrificed its productive and manufacturing base in search of ever-increasing numbers of tourists is the best possible case study.

So it was that I found myself in Venice for the latter part of last week, speaking at the Digital Europe conference.

The conference marked the end of a massive two-year research study by three European think-tanks into the ways that computers and the internet can support sustainable development.

If we are going to balance the economic, social and environmental aspects of our activities and ensure that the world is capable of supporting human life in future, the argument goes, then we need to think in a very different way about the world's economy and its impact on people and the environment.

We need to have an economic model which does not destroy the world, one which can be sustained in the long-term.

Growth of the web

It is a point of view that I find very appealing, since it does not call for a return to some mystical pre-industrial age when we all lived in harmony with nature, but nor does it accept that the free market will solve all humanity's problems.

The real question is not whether we use computers to support a more sustainable way of running things, but how we use them Bill Thompson

Sustainability is not a new idea, and it has had high-level support for many years.

Following the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 178 governments signed up to Agenda 21, a plan for action that recognised the need for radical change in the way the global economy operates, and since then a lot has been achieved, even if it is clearly not enough.

However the rapid development of computers, and the growth of the internet and the web, seemed to hold out the possibility that we could protect the environment and still have a modern industrial economy.

Digital Europe set out to examine whether this was in fact true, or whether it was just more wishful thinking by idealistic geeks and public relations hype by rapacious computer companies keen to sell processors, networks and software to gullible environmentalists.

It would be nice to report that everything is sorted, and that once we are all online we will be able to balance the needs of the environment against our desire for more material goods, but as usual things are not that simple.

For example, a lot of the discussion at the conference was about so-called dematerialisation - the idea that if you move bits around instead of atoms then you can reduce pollution and energy use.

Sending a music file to someone over the net uses a lot less energy than making a CD and transporting it to a shop.

Unfortunately once you start burning your own CDs at home you actually use a lot more energy than making the same disk in a modern pressing plant.

The environmental costs of making the computers in the first place can be astonishing. Research by the Wuppertal Institute shows that a 200 gram handheld computer requires the equivalent of 58 kilograms of raw materials in its manufacture, a massive overhead that we rarely think about.

Scarce resources

This sort of detailed analysis of what is really happening is vital, as is a willingness to think creatively about ways we might use the net to manage the world's resources properly, or reduce energy consumption, or help people live better lives.

Use of mobile phones in developing nations is exploding

I enjoyed the conference a lot, and there was a lot of valuable discussion. Perhaps the most useful thing said by anyone, however, was a throwaway comment in one of the discussion sessions on the first day.

We were talking about whether computers were making a positive contribution, and one of the people at my table said "are railways good or bad? Sometimes we just have to cope".

It seemed to me to sum up the whole debate about the way computers affect the world. We are already dependent on them, and like other technologies they are not going to go away.

So the real question is not whether we use computers to support a more sustainable way of running things, but how we use them.

The best thing about the conference was that it was very clear that there are lots of good ideas around for how to do this.

We just need to persuade the politicians and the people running large companies to listen.

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