Analyse how digital systems use and harm natural resources, ecosystems, cities and farms, and how they help to monitor and protect them, then evaluate the impacts for specific people and communities.
Each is in the Digital Society glossary, with every other term in the subject.
The variety of living things in a place or on Earth as a whole, including the diversity of species, the genetic diversity within species and the diversity of ecosystems.
The total amount of greenhouse gases released, directly and indirectly, by a product, activity, person or organisation, usually expressed in kilograms or tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e).
An economic model that aims to keep products and materials in use for as long as possible through durable design, repair, reuse, remanufacturing and recycling, instead of the linear model of take, make and dispose.
Minerals mined in conflict zones and sold in ways that fund armed groups, prolong violence or involve human rights abuses; the term usually refers to tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold.
Minerals that are essential to important technologies, such as electronics, batteries and renewable energy, and whose supply is at risk because production is concentrated in a few countries or is hard to increase quickly.
A building or group of buildings that houses large numbers of servers, storage systems and network equipment, together with the power supplies and cooling systems needed to keep them running continuously.
Discarded products that have a plug or battery, such as phones, computers, televisions, cables and household appliances, which often contain both valuable metals and hazardous substances.
Define key terms for the environmental context, including e-waste, planned obsolescence, green computing, smart city and precision agriculture.
Describe the natural resources, energy and water that digital devices and data centres depend on, and how unevenly these resources are distributed.
Explain how digital systems both threaten and help to protect ecosystems and biodiversity, and how they are used before, during and after natural disasters.
Outline the main types of pollution (air, water, solid, noise and light) and analyse how digital systems contribute to them and help to monitor them.
Discuss recycling, e-waste and planned obsolescence, and evaluate green computing as a response.
Explain how maps, GPS, GIS and smart-city technologies shape the design and use of cities, infrastructure, transport and wayfinding.
Analyse the impacts of digital systems on agricultural production and distribution for different farmers and communities.
Evaluate the impacts and implications of the Agbogbloshie e-waste site for people and communities in Ghana and beyond.
Apply a step-by-step method to analyse an unseen real-world example in the environmental context.
The environmental context covers the ways that people and communities interact with the natural and built worlds around them, and how digital systems change those interactions. Every smartphone, server and satellite is made from mined materials and runs on electricity, so the digital world has a physical footprint; at the same time, sensors, satellites and data analysis give people new ways to watch over forests, rivers, cities and farms.
The context draws on almost every content area of the course. Computers (3.3) and networks (3.4) are the devices and infrastructure whose materials, energy and waste create environmental costs. Data (3.1), algorithms (3.2), artificial intelligence (3.6) and robots and autonomous technologies (3.7) are the tools used to monitor ecosystems, forecast floods and steer tractors. The concepts give the lenses: change and systems explain how environmental problems build up over time and across supply chains, power and values and ethics explain who gains and who pays, and space explains why the costs of digital life often land far from where devices are used.
With a free account, Augment remembers where you stopped and what you have practiced.
An integrated system that detects or forecasts a hazard, assesses the risk and sends timely warnings to people in danger so that they can act to reduce harm.
A community of living organisms interacting with each other and with their physical environment, such as a rainforest, a coral reef or a wetland.
A computer system for capturing, storing, analysing and displaying data linked to locations on the Earth's surface, usually as layers on a map that share the same coordinates.
A US-owned satellite navigation system in which receivers calculate their position on Earth by measuring the time taken for signals to arrive from several satellites.
Designing, making, using and disposing of computers and other digital systems in ways that reduce their environmental impact, for example by saving energy, using renewable power, extending device life and recycling safely.
Excessive or badly directed artificial light, such as skyglow over cities, glare and light spilling into places where it is not wanted, which disrupts ecosystems, human sleep and views of the night sky.
Any material or energy source that comes from the natural world and that people use, such as minerals, water, land, forests and fossil fuels.
Designing or managing a product so that it becomes outdated, stops working or seems unfashionable after a limited time, which encourages people to replace it sooner.
A measure of a data centre's energy efficiency, found by dividing the total energy the facility uses by the energy used by its computing equipment; a value of 1.0 would mean no energy is used for cooling or other overheads.
A farming approach that uses GPS, sensors, satellite or drone images and data analysis to measure differences within fields and apply water, seed, fertiliser and pesticides only where and when they are needed.
Collecting information about the Earth's surface or atmosphere from a distance, usually with sensors on satellites, aircraft or drones that measure reflected light, heat or radar signals.
The principle, increasingly written into law, that owners and independent repairers should be able to fix products, with access to spare parts, tools, manuals and software at a fair price.
An urban area that uses sensors, networks and data analysis to monitor and manage services such as transport, energy, water, waste and public safety, with the aim of making them more efficient and sustainable.
The process by which people orient themselves in a physical space and plan and follow a route to a destination, using cues such as signs, landmarks, maps and, increasingly, navigation apps.
Digital systems relate to the environment in two directions at once. In the first, digital systems are a cause of environmental change: they consume natural resources, energy and water, and they create pollution and waste. In the second, digital systems are a tool for understanding and managing the environment: they measure, map, model and predict what happens in the natural and built world.
Relationship | What it means | Real-world examples |
|---|---|---|
Digital systems as a cause of environmental impacts | Making, running and discarding digital systems uses resources and releases pollution | Cobalt mining for batteries in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; electricity use of data centres; e-waste burned at Agbogbloshie, Ghana |
Digital systems as a tool for the environment | Collecting and analysing environmental data to monitor, protect and plan | Satellites tracking deforestation; flood forecasts sent to phones; precision spraying that cuts herbicide use |
Most real-world examples involve both relationships. A network of air-quality sensors helps a city reduce pollution, but each sensor contains metals, needs power and eventually becomes waste. Developers' claims usually describe only the second relationship.
A natural resource is any material or energy source that comes from the natural world and that people use, such as minerals, water, land, forests and fossil fuels. Digital devices depend on a long list of them. A typical smartphone contains copper for wiring, gold and tin for connections, lithium and cobalt in the battery, silicon in the chips, rare earth elements in the speakers and vibration motor, and indium in the touchscreen.
Governments use the label critical minerals because the digital economy and the shift to clean energy depend on the same small set of materials: electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels compete with smartphones and data centres for lithium, cobalt, copper and rare earths.
Mineral deposits are spread unevenly across the world, so a small number of countries supply most of certain materials. The places that mine these resources are often not the places where the finished devices are designed, sold or used.
Material | Use in digital systems | Concentration of supply | Environmental and social concerns |
|---|---|---|---|
Cobalt | Lithium-ion batteries in phones, laptops and electric cars | The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) produced about three-quarters of the world's mined cobalt in 2024 | Child labour and unsafe artisanal mines; dust and water contamination near mining towns |
Lithium | Rechargeable batteries | Large deposits in Australia and in the "lithium triangle" of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia | Brine extraction in Chile's Salar de Atacama uses scarce water in one of the driest places on Earth |
Rare earth elements | Magnets in speakers, motors and hard drives | China leads both mining and processing | Toxic and radioactive waste from processing |
Tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold | Solder, capacitors, vibration motors, connectors | Eastern DRC is one source among several | Armed groups have financed conflict through mine profits |
Source: USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025 (cobalt share).
Concentrated supply creates two kinds of risk. For manufacturers and governments in importing countries, it is a risk to supply, which is why the EU, the USA and others publish lists of critical minerals. For people living near mines, the risks are environmental and social. In 2016 Amnesty International documented children working in artisanal cobalt mines in the DRC, and traced the cobalt through processing companies to the supply chains of well-known electronics brands.
Laws now try to make supply chains more transparent. Section 1502 of the US Dodd-Frank Act (2010) requires listed companies to report whether their products contain conflict minerals from the DRC and neighbouring countries. The EU Conflict Minerals Regulation, applied from January 2021, requires importers of these four metals to check their suppliers. Through the concept of power, these laws shift some responsibility from miners in the Global South to the companies that profit most from finished devices, although critics point out that they cover only a few metals and that checks depend on paperwork that can be falsified.
Much of the energy used by digital systems is consumed out of sight, in data centres. These buildings run the cloud computing services, streaming platforms, search engines and artificial intelligence models that people use every day.
Data centres use electricity in two main ways: to run the servers themselves and to cool them, since servers turn almost all the electricity they use into heat. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that data centres used about 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2024, about 1.5% of all the electricity used in the world. The United States accounted for 45% of this, China for 25% and Europe for 15%. The IEA expects demand to more than double by 2030, mainly because of the spread of artificial intelligence.
Local impacts can be much larger than these global shares suggest, because data centres cluster where land, connections and tax rules suit them. In Ireland, data centres used about a fifth of all metered electricity in 2023, and the grid operator EirGrid stopped accepting new data centre connections in the Dublin area until the network could cope. For people and communities nearby, the issues are higher demand on the grid, new power stations and competition for water and land.
Water is a second hidden resource. Many data centres use water to cool servers through evaporation, and chip factories need very large amounts of ultrapure water. During Taiwan's severe drought in 2021, the chipmaker TSMC brought in water by truck to keep its factories running, while farmers in some areas had irrigation supplies cut so that water could go to industry. Through the concept of values and ethics, this raises the question of whose uses of a scarce resource come first.
A carbon footprint is a way of measuring the climate impact of a product, activity, person or organisation by adding up all the greenhouse gases it causes.
Studies estimate that information and communication technology (ICT) causes between about 2% and 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a share comparable to aviation. For a personal device, most of the footprint usually comes from manufacturing rather than use: mining, chip fabrication and assembly are energy-intensive, while a phone needs only a small amount of electricity to charge. Keeping a device for longer therefore often does more for the climate than any change in how it is used.
The device life cycle diagram shows where pressures on the environment arise at each stage. The curved arrows show the two ways of slowing the cycle down: repairing and reusing devices, and recovering materials to make new ones.
Changes in software can also change the size of a footprint dramatically. The cryptocurrency Ethereum switched its method of validating transactions in September 2022 (an event known as "the Merge"), which the Ethereum Foundation estimates cut the network's energy use by more than 99.9%. Bitcoin still uses the older, energy-hungry method.
An ecosystem is a community of living organisms interacting with each other and with their physical environment, such as a rainforest, a coral reef or a wetland. Biodiversity is the variety of life within and between such ecosystems.
Digital systems threaten ecosystems mainly through the resources they consume. Open-pit mines for copper, cobalt and other metals clear forest and soil, and their waste can poison rivers for many kilometres downstream. In Chile's Salar de Atacama, lithium is extracted by pumping mineral-rich brine into evaporation ponds. Indigenous Lickanantay communities and scientists have raised concerns that this lowers water levels in a fragile salt-flat ecosystem that supports flamingos and local farming.
Digital platforms also create less obvious threats. Online marketplaces and social media make it easier to trade endangered animals and products such as ivory, reptile skins and exotic pets, because sellers can reach buyers across borders. In 2018 conservation organisations including WWF, TRAFFIC and IFAW set up the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, through which technology companies such as Google, Alibaba and Facebook (now Meta) agreed to remove such listings.
Digital systems also help to protect ecosystems, because they make it possible to observe large and remote areas continuously. The most important technique is remote sensing.
Satellites such as NASA's Landsat series and the EU's Copernicus Sentinel satellites photograph the whole planet every few days, and much of their data is free. Researchers and governments compare images over time to measure forest loss, coral bleaching, melting glaciers and the spread of farmland. Because the data is public, journalists and campaign groups can check official claims, which shifts some power away from governments and companies that might prefer to hide environmental damage.
Closer to the ground, other sensors and machine learning help to track individual species:
Camera traps take photographs when an animal passes. Platforms such as Wildlife Insights use machine learning to identify the species in millions of images, a task that once took researchers months.
Acoustic monitoring records the sounds of a forest. Rainforest Connection places old smartphones, powered by solar panels, high in trees; the devices listen for chainsaws and logging trucks and send alerts to rangers in near real time.
Citizen science apps such as eBird and iNaturalist let members of the public record sightings of birds, plants and insects. The millions of records they collect help scientists map where species live and how their ranges shift as the climate changes.
Natural events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, floods, droughts and wildfires become disasters when they harm people and communities who are exposed and unprepared. Digital systems are used at every stage: understanding risk, detecting hazards, warning people, responding and recovering.
An early warning system is the main way that digital systems reduce deaths from natural hazards.
The United Nations describes four elements that every effective early warning system needs. The diagram shows how they connect and how each relies on different digital systems.
Japan's earthquake early warning system, run by the Japan Meteorological Agency since 2007, shows how fast this chain can work. Seismometers across the country detect the first, faster-moving waves of an earthquake, computers estimate its size and location within seconds, and alerts go out to phones, television and trains before the more damaging waves arrive. The warning may give only a few seconds to a minute, but that is enough for high-speed trains to brake and for people to take cover.
Other examples show the range of hazards covered:
After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed about 230,000 people in 14 countries, governments set up the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System, using seabed pressure sensors, tide gauges and international data sharing.
Google's Flood Hub uses machine learning to forecast river floods up to seven days ahead. By late 2024 Google reported coverage in 100 countries, in areas where about 700 million people live, including many places with few river gauges.
In 2022 the UN Secretary-General launched the Early Warnings for All initiative, with the goal of protecting every person on Earth with early warning systems by 2027.
Warnings increasingly reach people through cell broadcast, which sends one message to every phone connected to the mobile masts in an area without needing their phone numbers. This method is fast and does not require an app, but it reaches only people with a phone and a signal.
After a disaster, the Copernicus Emergency Management Service produces damage maps from satellite images within hours of a request. Volunteers with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team traced roads and buildings from satellite images after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2015 Nepal earthquake, giving rescue teams maps of areas never mapped in detail. Social media and messaging apps let survivors call for help and families find each other.
Digital disaster systems carry risks as well as benefits. People without phones, electricity or internet access, often the poorest and oldest, are least likely to receive warnings, which repeats the digital divide in a life-or-death setting. Networks and power often fail in the disaster itself, so warnings and coordination that depend on them may stop when they are most needed. False alarms damage trust: in January 2018 an emergency alert wrongly warned people in Hawaii of an incoming ballistic missile, and it took 38 minutes to send a correction.
Pollution is the release of harmful substances or energy into the environment. Digital systems contribute to each of the five main types, and they are also used to measure and reduce each one.
Type of pollution | How digital systems contribute | How digital systems help to monitor or reduce it |
|---|---|---|
Air | Power stations that supply data centres and factories; backup diesel generators; open burning of e-waste | Low-cost sensor networks such as Breathe London and PurpleAir; satellite monitoring of gases; cameras that enforce London's Ultra Low Emission Zone |
Water | Mining run-off; chemicals from chip factories; toxic residues from informal e-waste processing | River sensors; England's monitors on sewage overflows, whose public data campaigners use to hold water companies to account |
Solid | E-waste; packaging from online shopping; mine waste | Sensor-equipped bins that report when they are full; apps that list repair shops and recycling points |
Noise | Cooling fans of data centres; delivery drones | Noise sensor networks such as the SONYC project in New York; noise maps that EU cities must publish under the Environmental Noise Directive |
Light | Illuminated screens and digital billboards; reflections from satellite constellations | Satellite measurements of night-time light; citizen science projects such as Globe at Night; dimmable smart streetlights |
The World Health Organization estimates that 99% of the world's population breathes air that exceeds its guideline limits for pollutants, so air quality data affects almost everyone. Low-cost sensors have made this data far more local: residents can now see pollution on their own street, not only at a few official stations. The data is only as reliable as the sensors, however, and cheap devices can drift out of calibration, so official stations remain the reference.
Light pollution is often overlooked, but it is growing quickly.
A 2016 world atlas of night-sky brightness found that more than 80% of the world's population, and more than 99% of people in the USA and Europe, live under light-polluted skies, and that the Milky Way is hidden from about one-third of humanity. Using more than 50,000 observations submitted by members of the public to the Globe at Night project between 2011 and 2022, researchers calculated in 2023 that the night sky was getting brighter by about 9.6% per year. Artificial light disorients migrating birds and newly hatched sea turtles, disrupts insects that pollinate plants at night, and affects human sleep patterns.
Digital systems are part of the cause and part of the solution. Bright LED screens and digital billboards add to skyglow, and thousands of communication satellites, such as SpaceX's Starlink constellation, leave streaks across astronomers' images. Smart streetlights can dim when streets are empty, and satellite data allows cities to measure their own light output.
E-waste is one of the fastest-growing streams of solid waste in the world and the most direct environmental impact of digital devices.
According to the Global E-waste Monitor 2024, published by the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and UNITAR, the world generated a record 62 billion kg of e-waste in 2022, about 7.8 kg for every person. Only 22.3% was documented as formally collected and recycled in an environmentally sound way. Generation is rising almost five times faster than formal recycling and is projected to reach 82 billion kg by 2030.
E-waste is both a hazard and a resource. The same report estimates that the metals in e-waste generated in 2022 were worth about USD 91 billion, but only about USD 28 billion was recovered. Poorly managed e-waste releases about 58,000 kg of mercury every year, along with lead, cadmium and plastics containing brominated flame retardants, which can damage the brain, kidneys and development of children.
E-waste also moves across borders. The monitor reports that about 65% of e-waste shipped between countries in 2019 moved in uncontrolled and undocumented ways from high-income to low- and middle-income countries, often labelled as second-hand goods. The Basel Convention, an international treaty on hazardous waste, was amended so that from January 2025 almost all exports of e-waste need the prior informed consent of the importing country.
Waste management follows the waste hierarchy: the best option is to prevent waste, then to reuse and repair products, then to recycle materials, then to recover energy, and only last to dispose of waste in landfill. Recycling is valuable but sits low in the hierarchy, because it destroys the product and recovers only some of its materials.
E-waste recycling takes two very different forms.
Formal recycling | Informal recycling | |
|---|---|---|
Who does it | Licensed companies with regulated facilities | Individuals and small businesses, often without permits |
Methods | Shredding, sorting machines, smelters with pollution controls | Hand dismantling, open burning of cables, acid baths to extract gold |
Materials recovered | Wide range, including small amounts of gold, palladium and rare metals | Mostly copper, aluminium, steel and a few valuable parts |
Environmental impacts | Controlled emissions; some energy use | Toxic smoke, contaminated soil and water |
Impacts on people | Regulated work, but fewer jobs | Income for many low-paid workers, but serious health risks |
Many countries use extended producer responsibility (EPR), which makes manufacturers responsible for collecting and recycling their products after use. The EU's Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive requires shops and producers to take back old devices, and Ghana's Hazardous and Electronic Waste Control and Management Act of 2016 charges an eco-levy on imported electronics to fund recycling. Companies are also automating disassembly: Apple's Daisy robot takes apart iPhones to recover materials that shredding would lose.
One reason so much e-waste is created is planned obsolescence.
Planned obsolescence takes several forms:
Technical obsolescence: parts that wear out and cannot easily be replaced, such as batteries glued into a phone.
Software obsolescence: devices that stop receiving security updates or can no longer run new apps, even though the hardware still works.
Perceived obsolescence: marketing and yearly product launches that make older models seem out of date.
The idea is older than digital technology. In 1924 the leading light-bulb makers formed the Phoebus cartel, which agreed to limit bulb life to about 1,000 hours. In the digital era, the best-known case is Apple's slowing of older iPhones through software updates in 2017. Apple said it was preventing unexpected shutdowns caused by ageing batteries, but users had not been told. Italy's competition authority fined Apple €10 million in 2018, and in 2020 France's consumer protection authority fined it €25 million for misleading consumers by omission.
Some governments now treat planned obsolescence as a legal issue. France made deliberately shortening a product's life a criminal offence in 2015, and from 2021 it required many electronic products to display a repairability score out of 10. The EU required USB-C as a common charging port for phones and many other devices from December 2024, so that new devices no longer need a different charger. The right to repair movement goes further.
Manufacturers' counter-claims deserve attention. They argue that sealed designs make devices thinner and more water-resistant, that ending software support is needed to keep devices secure, and that unauthorised repairs can create safety risks, for example with lithium-ion batteries. A balanced evaluation weighs these claims against evidence that restricting repair also protects manufacturers' sales of new devices and paid repair services.
Green computing is the response of the technology industry and its users to these environmental costs.
Strategy | What it involves | Real-world example |
|---|---|---|
Energy efficiency | More efficient chips and cooling; measuring power usage effectiveness (PUE) | Google reports an average PUE of about 1.1 across its data centres, meaning about 10% extra energy is used beyond what the servers themselves need |
Renewable energy | Running data centres on wind, solar or hydroelectric power | Large technology companies buy renewable electricity through long-term contracts |
Reusing waste heat | Piping heat from servers into local heating networks | Stockholm Data Parks in Sweden; Meta's data centre in Odense, Denmark, which supplies heat to local homes |
Longer device life | Modular, repairable design; long software support | Fairphone sells phones designed to be opened and repaired by their owners |
Responsible end of life | Take-back schemes, refurbishing and certified recycling | EU WEEE take-back rules |
Green computing connects to the wider idea of a circular economy.
Evaluation of green computing needs care. Efficiency gains can lead to more use rather than less: as computing becomes cheaper per task, people and companies run more tasks, a pattern known as the rebound effect. Data centres have become far more efficient per calculation, yet their total electricity use is still rising. Claims that a company is "carbon neutral" may also depend on buying offsets rather than reducing emissions, which critics describe as greenwashing. Green computing therefore reduces harm, but on its own it does not guarantee that the total footprint of digital systems falls.
More than half of the world's people live in cities, and digital systems increasingly shape how those cities are designed and used. A smart city is the most ambitious version of this.
Smart-city technologies rely on the Internet of Things: sensors in roads, bins, streetlights, pipes and buildings report data that software uses to adjust traffic lights, plan bin collections or find leaking water mains. Some cities build a digital twin, a detailed virtual model of the city that is updated with real data. Virtual Singapore, a 3D model of the whole city-state, lets planners test how a new building would affect wind, sunlight and crowds before it is built.
Two well-known projects show the possibilities and the problems:
Songdo, South Korea was built from the early 2000s on land reclaimed from the sea near Incheon, with sensors and networks designed in from the start and pneumatic pipes that carry rubbish underground. It has efficient buildings and many green spaces, but it filled more slowly than planned, and critics argue that a city designed from the top down lacks the mixed, informal life of older cities.
Quayside, Toronto, Canada was a plan by Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, to build a sensor-rich neighbourhood on the city's waterfront. It faced strong public opposition over who would own and control the data collected about residents. Sidewalk Labs withdrew in May 2020, citing economic uncertainty.
Through the concept of power, smart cities raise the question of who controls urban data and decisions: elected councils, technology companies or residents. Through the concept of values and ethics, they raise questions about surveillance in public space. Environmental benefits such as less congestion and lower energy use must be weighed against these concerns and against the resources the sensors consume.
Infrastructure means the basic physical systems a society depends on: roads, railways, power grids, water and sewage networks, and telecommunications. Digital systems now monitor and control most of them. Smart meters report household electricity and water use, which helps utilities balance supply and helps households see where they waste energy. Acoustic sensors in water pipes listen for the sound of leaks, which matters in cities that lose a large share of their treated water before it reaches homes.
Digital infrastructure is also infrastructure in its own right. Data centres, mobile masts and submarine cables occupy land, need power and change landscapes. Where data centres cluster, as in Dublin and Northern Virginia in the USA, local people may gain jobs and tax revenue but also face grid upgrades and new transmission lines. Through the concept of systems, a decision in one part of the system (where companies build cloud capacity) affects other parts (household energy prices and local land use).
Digital maps rely on two technologies that are easy to confuse: GPS, which works out where something is, and GIS, which stores and analyses information about places.
The Global Positioning System is operated by the US Space Force and uses a constellation of about 30 satellites. A receiver, such as the chip in a phone, needs signals from at least four satellites to calculate its position, because it must also correct for errors in its own clock. GPS is one of several global navigation satellite systems: the EU runs Galileo, Russia runs GLONASS and China runs BeiDou. Most modern phones use several of them at once, which improves accuracy and means no single government controls all the signals.
A geographic information system combines layers of data that share the same coordinates. Each layer holds one kind of information, and overlaying them answers questions that no single map could answer.
Maps are never neutral, because someone decides what to show and what to name. For many years, Kibera in Nairobi, one of Africa's largest informal settlements, appeared as a blank space on official maps. In 2009 young residents of the project Map Kibera used GPS devices and the open map OpenStreetMap to map its paths, clinics, schools and water points for the first time. Through the concept of power, the project shows that making a map is a way of making a community visible to the authorities who provide services.
Wayfinding is how people work out where they are and how to get to where they want to go.
Navigation apps such as Google Maps, Waze and Citymapper combine GPS positions, digital maps and live data from millions of phones to suggest the fastest route. Transport authorities increasingly publish open data; Transport for London's free real-time data feeds, for example, power many of the apps that Londoners use to plan journeys. Ride-hailing and bike-sharing services depend entirely on GPS to match riders with vehicles.
These systems have environmental and social impacts beyond convenience. Routing algorithms that send each driver along the fastest path can push heavy traffic onto quiet residential streets, bringing noise, pollution and danger to residents who never chose it. In January 2018 the town of Leonia, New Jersey, closed most of its residential streets to non-residents during rush hours because navigation apps were sending commuters through it, then began scaling the ban back within weeks after complaints from local businesses. Decisions about traffic flows had in effect moved from local planners to an app. On the other hand, journey planners that show public transport, walking and cycling alongside driving can encourage lower-carbon travel, and some apps now offer routes that use the least fuel.
Dependence on satellite navigation also creates risks. GPS signals are weak and can be jammed or faked ("spoofed"). Since 2022, airlines and ships in the Baltic Sea region and the eastern Mediterranean have reported widespread interference with GPS signals, linked to military conflicts nearby. Studies also suggest that people who rely heavily on turn-by-turn directions build weaker mental maps of their surroundings.
Agriculture is where people interact most directly with natural resources: soil, water, climate and living things. Digital systems are changing both how food is produced and how it reaches consumers.
Precision agriculture is the main way digital systems are used in farm production.
Traditional farming treats a whole field the same way. Precision agriculture adjusts to differences in soil, moisture and pests across a field, working as a cycle that improves each season as more data is collected, as the diagram shows.
The main technologies in precision agriculture are:
GPS guidance: tractors and harvesters steer themselves along exact lines, so they do not overlap and waste fuel, seed and chemicals.
Variable-rate application: machines change how much seed or fertiliser they release as they cross a field, following a map made from soil tests or satellite images.
Machine vision: John Deere's See & Spray system uses cameras and machine learning to recognise weeds and spray only them. The company reported average herbicide savings of 59% on more than 1 million acres in 2024. Savings are largest where weeds are few, because fewer plants need spraying.
Drones photograph crops to spot disease or water stress, and in China they are widely used for spraying.
Mobile apps for smallholders: Plantix diagnoses crop diseases from a photograph, and Hello Tractor in Nigeria lets small farmers book a tractor by phone, much as a ride-hailing app books a car.
The environmental benefits can be significant: less fertiliser running off into rivers, fewer pesticides harming insects and wildlife, and less water and fuel used for each tonne of food. The benefits depend, however, on who can afford the technology. Self-driving tractors and camera-equipped sprayers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, so they suit large farms in wealthy countries. Smallholder farmers, who produce much of the world's food in Asia and Africa, are more likely to benefit from cheap phone apps and shared services.
Distribution covers everything between the farm and the consumer: storage, transport, markets and sales. Digital systems change distribution in several ways:
Market information: services such as Esoko in Ghana send farmers crop prices and weather forecasts by text message, so they can decide when and where to sell and are less dependent on the prices that middlemen offer.
E-commerce: online platforms let farmers sell directly to consumers. In China, the e-commerce platform Pinduoduo grew partly by selling fruit and vegetables directly from rural farms to urban buyers.
Cold chains and tracking: temperature sensors in trucks and warehouses help to keep food fresh during transport, and tracking systems can trace contaminated food back to its source quickly.
Stakeholder | Main claims | Main concerns |
|---|---|---|
Large commercial farms | Higher yields, lower input costs, less labour | High cost of equipment; dependence on one manufacturer |
Smallholder farmers | Better prices and advice through phones | Cost of data and devices; poor coverage in rural areas |
Equipment makers (e.g. John Deere) | Products save farmers money and help the environment | Must protect software, safety and intellectual property |
Farm workers | Less exposure to chemicals; new technical jobs | Automation may replace some seasonal jobs |
Local ecosystems and communities | Less chemical run-off and water use | Farm data may encourage even larger, less diverse farms |
The question of who owns and controls farm data is growing. Machines collect detailed data about each field, and that data is often stored on the manufacturer's platform. Repair is a second point of conflict: farmers in the USA have long complained that software locks prevent them from fixing their own tractors, and in January 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission sued John Deere, alleging that it had restricted repairs to its own dealers. Through the concept of power, this shows how control over software can shift control over physical machines, and over the farms that depend on them, to manufacturers.
Agbogbloshie was a scrapyard in central Accra, the capital of Ghana, on the banks of the Odaw River where it flows into the Korle Lagoon. Next to it lies Old Fadama, a large informal settlement where tens of thousands of people live, many of them migrants from northern Ghana. From the 1990s onwards, the scrapyard became one of the best-known e-waste processing sites in the world, and it appeared in international media as a symbol of the hidden end of the digital economy. In 2013 the environmental organisations Blacksmith Institute (now Pure Earth) and Green Cross Switzerland listed it among the world's ten worst toxic pollution threats.
Thousands of people, mostly young men, earned a living at the site by collecting, dismantling and selling scrap. On 1 July 2021, the Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council, supported by armed police, demolished the scrapyard as part of a plan to clear the area, removing the workplace of thousands of scrap dealers. Many dealers moved to other sites on the edge of Accra, and some returned to the area in the following years.
The digital systems at the heart of the case are the computers, phones, televisions, cables and other electronic devices that reached Agbogbloshie at the end of their lives. Understanding the site requires following the flow of these devices, as the diagram shows.
Many devices began life in Europe or North America and were shipped to Ghana as second-hand goods. A UN study of West African countries, carried out between 2009 and 2011, found that about 70% of imported electronics were used rather than new, and that about 30% of the used imports did not work. Working devices were sold, repaired and reused in Ghana, often for many years, by a large network of repair shops that made computers and phones affordable for people on low incomes. When devices could finally no longer be repaired, together with those discarded by Ghanaian households and offices, collectors with handcarts bought them and took them to Agbogbloshie.
At the scrapyard, workers dismantled devices by hand with hammers and chisels. They burned cables, often using old foam or tyres as fuel, to remove the plastic insulation and reach the copper inside, which they sold to dealers who exported it. Burning was quick and cheap, and it was the main source of the toxic smoke that hung over the site.
YouTubeScrap workers gained an income in a city where formal jobs were scarce, and the work supported families in northern Ghana through money sent home. The cost was their health: workers reported burns, eye irritation, breathing problems and headaches, and studies found high levels of lead and other metals in workers' blood and urine.
Residents of Old Fadama and nearby markets, including families with young children and traders at the neighbouring food market, were exposed to the smoke and to contaminated dust and water without earning anything from the scrap trade. In 2019 the organisations IPEN and the Basel Action Network tested eggs from chickens that roamed the site. They found very high levels of dioxins and other persistent pollutants, including the highest level of brominated dioxins ever measured in eggs; an adult eating one egg would exceed the European Food Safety Authority's tolerable intake for chlorinated dioxins 220 times over.
The wider environment suffered as residues washed into the Odaw River and the Korle Lagoon, which flow into the Gulf of Guinea. Soil around the burning sites was contaminated with heavy metals.
Ghanaian consumers benefited from the reuse economy, which gave many people their first computer or phone. Exporters and consumers in high-income countries benefited from cheap disposal, while the costs were felt thousands of kilometres away.
The concept of space shows how the costs of the digital economy are separated from its benefits. The design and use of devices are concentrated in wealthy places, while extraction and disposal are concentrated in poorer places such as the cobalt mines of the DRC and the scrapyards of Accra, out of sight of most users.
Viewed through the concept of power, the case shows an imbalance between those who make decisions about devices and those who bear their consequences. Manufacturers decide how repairable and recyclable devices are; governments in exporting countries decide how strictly to control shipments; the Ghanaian government decided to demolish the site. Scrap workers and residents had little influence over any of these decisions, although associations such as the Greater Accra Scrap Dealers Association did negotiate with authorities.
The concept of values and ethics raises a question of environmental justice: is it fair that the poorest communities bear the greatest health risks from products that wealthier people use and discard? A consequentialist view might weigh the jobs and affordable devices against the health harms; a rights-based view would stress that no economic benefit justifies poisoning children's food.
Seen as part of a system, Agbogbloshie was one point in a global system of production, trade, reuse and recycling. Its pollution resulted from interactions between device design (hard to take apart), global trade (cheap shipping of used goods), local economics (copper prices and few jobs) and weak enforcement, so changing one element alone was unlikely to solve the problem.
Several responses tried to reduce the harm:
Response | What it did | Strengths | Limitations |
|---|---|---|---|
Basel Convention controls and the 2025 amendment | Require the importing country's consent before e-waste is exported (almost all e-waste from 2025) | Address the international flow of waste | Hard to enforce when waste is labelled as second-hand goods; much e-waste is generated in Ghana itself |
Ghana's Act 917 (2016) and eco-levy (collected from 2018) | Charge importers a fee to fund e-waste management; require take-back | Makes importers pay for disposal | Enforcement and formal recycling capacity have lagged behind the volume of e-waste |
Pure Earth's recycling centre (2014) | Provided cable-stripping machines as an alternative to burning | Kept income while reducing smoke | Machines could not process fine cables, which were still burned |
Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (2010s) | Architects and scrap workers built mobile workshops and a mobile app for sharing information and skills | Treated workers as skilled makers; open-source designs | Small scale compared with the size of the problem |
Demolition of the scrapyard (2021) | Cleared the site for redevelopment | Ended open burning at that location | Moved workers and pollution elsewhere; removed livelihoods without alternatives |
Agbogbloshie is often described as a "dumping ground" for the rich world's electronics, but the evidence supports a more complicated judgement. Imports of used devices did contribute, and some were broken on arrival, yet many devices reached the scrapyard only after years of valuable reuse in Ghana, and a large share of the e-waste was generated locally. The harm came less from the presence of e-waste than from the methods used to process it, which in turn reflected poverty, the high value of copper and the absence of affordable formal recycling.
The most effective responses are therefore likely to be those that change how e-waste is processed rather than only where it goes. Demolition removed the visible symbol but displaced the activity; export controls address only part of the flow. Investment in safe processing that keeps workers' incomes, combined with producer responsibility that makes manufacturers pay for collection and design devices to be taken apart easily, addresses more of the system. The case shows that the environmental costs of digital systems follow from design, trade and policy decisions that could be made differently.
The same six steps work for any real-world example in this context, whether a news story, a source or a case met for the first time. They turn a description into an analysis and then an evaluation.
Step | Question to ask | Course link |
|---|---|---|
1. Identify the digital system | What technology, application or platform is involved, and how does it work? | Content 3.1–3.7 |
2. Place it in the context | Which area does it touch: resources and ecosystems, pollution and waste, cities and infrastructure, or agriculture? Is the system a cause, a tool or both? | Context 4.3A–4.3D |
3. Identify people and communities | Who is directly affected, who is indirectly affected, and who has no voice? | People and communities, stakeholders |
4. Analyse impacts and implications | What effects have happened, positive and negative? What opportunities and risks follow? Are they intended or unintended, short-term or long-term? | Impacts and implications |
5. Apply concepts | Which concept gives the most insight: change, expression, identity, power, space, systems, or values and ethics? | Concepts 2.1–2.7 |
6. Evaluate | Weighing the claims and counter-claims, what judgement is justified, and under what conditions? | Evaluation and synthesis |
Source-based questions combine a short source, here a set of data, with own knowledge.
I can define natural resource, critical minerals and conflict minerals, and give examples of materials used in digital devices.
I can describe how resources such as cobalt and lithium are unevenly distributed, and explain the impacts on communities near mines.
I can explain why data centres use electricity and water, and use IEA data to describe how demand is changing.
I can explain why most of a device's carbon footprint comes from manufacturing, and what this means for how long devices should be kept.
I can explain how digital systems threaten ecosystems and biodiversity, and how remote sensing, camera traps and acoustic monitoring help to protect them.
I can describe the four elements of an early warning system and evaluate digital systems used in natural disasters, including who they leave out.
I can outline how digital systems contribute to and help monitor air, water, solid, noise and light pollution.
I can use Global E-waste Monitor data to describe the scale of e-waste and differences in recycling between regions.
I can distinguish between formal and informal recycling and explain the waste hierarchy.
I can define planned obsolescence, describe its forms and discuss responses such as the right to repair.
I can evaluate green computing, including the rebound effect.
I can distinguish between GPS and GIS and explain how maps, wayfinding apps and smart-city technologies affect people and communities.
I can analyse the impacts of precision agriculture and digital distribution on different farmers and communities.
I can evaluate the impacts of the Agbogbloshie e-waste site through at least two concepts.
I can apply the six-step method to an unseen real-world example in the environmental context.