How Can Youth Meaningfully Contribute to Manage the Ecological Impact of the Internet

By this point, there has been much coverage about the ecological impact of our internet infrastructures and especially, Artificial Intelligence (AI). As digital consumption has increased across the globe, especially among young people, the ecological impact of our online lives has become impossible to ignore. The challenge is not merely technical; it is cultural, behavioural, and political. Young people are significant users of mobile data, streaming platforms, cloud storage, and AI-assisted tools, and they are also the generation with the awareness of climate risk and a strong appetite for behavioural change. Their choices can influence both direct emissions and the market signals that shape how platforms design future services.

In this piece, we explore how young people can meaningfully reduce their own digital ecological footprint. While doing so, we also explore what experts have to say about the role of youth in managing this ecological footprint.

Youth, Platforms, and the High Energy Digital Lifestyle

In Southeast Asia, 99.6% of individuals aged 16-24 use social media monthly, making it the most common online activity in the region, surpassing even search engine use. They use an average of 7.5 platforms, significantly above the global average, and more than 90% stream videos on YouTube monthly.^[i] These patterns also form a partial basis for a high digital footprint as platforms are designed to favour video-heavy content, algorithmic feeds, and continuous engagement, all of which require substantial energy. The energy cost of common activities illustrates the scale. 

Streaming Netflix in HD uses roughly 3 GB of data per hour, while a video call consumes between 2.5 and 15 MB of data per minute. Even small actions add up - an email with an attachment, a cloud-synced photo, a saved TikTok draft. A Google search now emits around 0.02 g CO₂, improved from earlier calculations but still significant in the aggregate when multiplied by billions of daily searches. These micro actions contribute significantly to the larger ecological footprint through scale, frequency, and the addictive design patterns that encourage constant engagement. Persuasive design features like infinite scroll, auto-play video, and algorithmic recommendation loops extend time spent online and thus extend the energy drawn from data centres. 

Designers like Tristan Harris have documented how these mechanics capture attention, often in ways that work against user well-being. From an ecological perspective, they also capture energy: more minutes online mean more megabytes transferred, more servers operating, and more cooling systems running. 

What Young People Can Do to Minimize Their Digital Ecological Footprint

Extending Device Lifetimes

The lifecycle of a smartphone, laptop, or tablet also has an environmental impact. The majority of a device’s total environmental impact occurs before the device is ever turned on. Studies show that as much as approximately 90 percent of a smartphone’s lifetime energy cost arises during manufacturing, not use. This is due to energy-intensive extraction and processing of rare earth elements, water-heavy refining, and manufacturing processes concentrated in countries where environmental protections are limited, and coal-powered grids are common. For young people who today face intense social pressure to upgrade frequently, choosing to keep a device for an additional year or two is therefore far more impactful than reducing screen brightness or closing unused apps. Extending the lifecycle of a device delays entry into e-waste streams, reduces demand for new mining, and lowers the carbon and water burdens in production. It is a structural action that can be promoted through personal choice.

Streaming and Connectivity Habits

Young people dominate global video consumption, especially short-form clips, livestreams, gaming streams, and high-definition entertainment. Video accounts for over 60 percent of global internet traffic, and according to European Investment Bank data, streaming a ten-minute video can consume as much energy as sending emails continuously for five hours. There are a number of ways youth can help in reducing the impact of videos, such as reducing resolution when high definition is unnecessary, streaming over Wi-Fi instead of cellular networks (which are substantially more energy intensive per gigabyte), and downloading frequently replayed music or videos to reduce network load.

Decluttering Data

Each photo saved automatically to a cloud service, each duplicate video, and each abandoned email newsletter contribute to the demand for data centres whose electricity and cooling requirements are rising globally. Even a single email with an attachment can emit up to 50 grams of CO₂, depending on its size and routing. Consumers tend to accumulate thousands of photographs, memes, screenshots, and auto-saved media from messaging apps, much of it forgotten. Periodically deleting unnecessary files, disabling automatic media downloads in apps like WhatsApp, and choosing to store large files locally rather than in cloud services decreases the replication load across global data centres. Because cloud architectures maintain multiple redundant copies for reliability, each gigabyte saved actually reduces storage across multiple mirrored servers.

Organizations like Green Software Foundation have published recommendations regarding this. In 2021, Google launched a campaign where they found that dormant data in data centres accounted for over 600 gross metric tons of CO₂ emissions. Google addressed this by creating the Unattended Project Recommender tool, which alerts users to their unnecessary data and its CO₂ impact, suggesting that they delete it. Although this solution is effective for reducing data centre demand by detecting, quantifying, and encouraging the removal of unused data, it is viewed primarily as a remedy for past design inefficiencies rather than a proactive feature. 

Other strategies through which youth can manage their digital footprint include: 

However, beyond these strategies, youth possess the drive to inform change. We interviewed a number of experts as part of our Changemaker Blog series. Let us take a look at what they have to say regarding the youth’s role in managing the environmental impact of internet infrastructures. 

Expert Opinions: How Can Youth Contribute to Making Internet Infrastructures More Sustainable 

We interviewed seven experts as part of our Changemaker Blog series. 

These experts are as follows: 

Most interviewees suggested the need to move from individual practices to advocate for systematic change. 

• Geraldine emphasized the need for young people to increase citizen awareness and engagement regarding sustainable digital infrastructure, while also being mindful of placing too much responsibility on the individual consumer. Geraldine suggested that while small personal actions are important, youth must simultaneously grasp the larger systems-level perspective and the ingrained profit maximization ecosystem that necessitates structural change beyond individual efforts.

  
  

• Hari highlighted that the role of youth, particularly in the Indian context, is often hindered by a conflict where they feel their small sustainable actions are negated by unsustainable lifestyle needs, leading to confusion and a sense of insignificance. He suggested that to encourage meaningful contributions, the impact of young people’s individual actions, especially in the digital environment, needs to be made measurable. Furthermore, Hari advises youth to move beyond individual, everyday actions by engaging with local communities and forums focused on larger climate action.

  
  

• Katrin and Michelle also asserted that youth must understand that the challenges are systemic and should focus their energy on demanding structural change, rather than accepting that the responsibility rests solely on their individual consumption. They also encourage them to work in a community to avoid feeling isolated by these issues.

  
  

• Yen Lin emphasised the need to make information and participation more accessible for youth. Yen Lin notes that while resources (like those from TWNIC or ICANN) are abundant, the information is often too complicated and dense for outsiders. The key problem is the lack of incentive for most young people to seek out and read this material on their own. Sometimes learning about Internet infrastructures or Internet governance can seem too abstract to youth. The solution, according to Lin, is to prioritize live events to provide a more direct, interactive, and less intimidating way to learn.

  
  

• Mike Jensen advised that the best way for youth to contribute is through active engagement is through community centred connectivity initiatives. Additionally, Mike highlighted the opportunity for youth to leverage emerging technologies like small-scale AI and TinyML for teaching, learning, and interpreting local environmental data, thereby using technology to improve knowledge and augment the skills of others.

Concluding Remarks 

While actions such as extending device lifetimes, reducing unnecessary streaming, scheduling downloads strategically, or cleaning up storage are important, they cannot solve the climate crisis alone. But taken together, they create a pattern of demand-side pressure that shifts norms, product design, and infrastructure planning. The digital system responds to user expectations: if young people normalise slower upgrade cycles, care about carbon-aware defaults, and value intentional platforms, companies have both reputational and economic incentives to redesign their interfaces accordingly. However, this duty must not fall on youth as individuals. It requires collaboration between various stakeholders as well as participating in capacity building, awareness, and digital literacy initiatives across all generations and stakeholders. As pointed out by experts above, managing internet infrastructures requires systematic change.

[i] Read more on South East Asia statistics here - https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-youth-in-south-east-asia-2021