Further Information
Quantitative Survey Scope
The quantitative survey titled Your Carbon Footprint in the Cloud opened on 3rd March 2024 and the last response was received 12th April 2024. The survey was conducted online via Google Forms and disseminated via social media, notably Facebook. It consisted of 25 questions across nine sections with one open-ended question and no required questions other than Acceptance of Terms.
Responses were 100% anonymous, with no log in required and no IP blocking. This made it as accessible as possible though it risked multiple responses. Data analysis shows no evidence of multiple or malicious responses.
Respondents were required to opt-in (n=57 agreed to do so) and, at completion, were given another opportunity to actively choose to submit their responses (n=51 did so). Therefore, n=6 people chose to opt-out at some point during the survey. This is most likely due to either survey length or lack of subject engagement. This produces a completion rate of 89.5%, significantly above the average online completion rate of 44.1%. (Wu, Zhao and Fils-Aime, 2022)
Survey questionnaire can be viewed as a PDF by clicking the button below.
Issues
From a sampling perspective, the response numbers are insufficient to be more than indicative. According to the Census, 747,961 people in Ireland worked from home in 2022. At a 95% confidence level with ±5% margin of error, this would require a completed survey sample size of 384 for Ireland, alone. Given this survey was disseminated globally, it is not representative of any given population. It does, however, suggest areas of concern that are worthy of further research.
The survey design included some question skips. For example, if someone responded that they were Retired, they were not asked subsequent questions about their work but were directed directly to questions on mobile phones and data storage.
Target Audience
The survey respondents met target audience requirements, with only three respondents (5.7%) who had not worked from home in the past four weeks.
Research Findings
In line with the CSO findings of 76% working from home (2022b), the majority (88%) of the Your Carbon Footprint in the Cloud survey also had their primary remote working venue as their home.
Three times as many respondents work remotely on a laptop compared to a desktop computer. All laptops, 87% of desktops and two-thirds of mobile phones used by respondents were supplied by their employee or owned by their business. This validates the need to include computer purchase and usage in employer reporting.
By contrast, routers more than half of routers were personally owned, suggesting homeworkers already have pre-existing Wi-Fi set up.
Most respondents rely solely on cloud computing, with nearly a quarter using both cloud and hard-drives. Interestingly, 12.5% claimed they did not use a cloud storage provider. This suggests it is worth adding a hard drive to the list of devices for the homeworking calculator in future.
Most respondents had no idea or were uncertain of how much cloud storage they utilised. This illustrates the issue with online data: its invisibility.
That said, nearly half of respondents felt data centres were the leading environmental culprits with a quarter unsure and just over another quarter attributing impact to device manufacturing. Many academic and industry researchers agree that data centres are the leading emissions contributor (Copenhagen Climate Centre, 2020; Molthan-Hill et al., 2023). There is some dissent, however; when usage and embodied emissions are both factored in, user devices may be the leading culprits, followed by networks, and with data centres contributing less than a third of device emissions. (Malmodin et al, 2023).
It is worth exploring further why data centres are assumed to be the leading source when respondents claim a much higher awareness of the impact of device manufacture than the impact of cloud computing. Perhaps this is because the connection between cloud computing to data centres is not directly linked in many people’s minds.
A mere one-in-five respondents had used a personal or household carbon footprint calculator, but 64% were interested in doing so. The majority felt that visualisation tools and recommendations would assist them most if they used such a tool.
