If you are a data scientist and try to find jobs using keywords like "data science and sustainability", most likely you won't find many jobs available. A realistic robot in an empty office room at night, turning off the light switch and holding a suitcase - Created by DALLE.E 3 But just because jobs are not explicitly described as sustainability, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. To find jobs that can help in the environment, let’s first understand what data science would mean in the context. Sustainability is defined by the United Nations, as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” While Environmental sustainability is the ability to maintain an ecological balance in our planet’s natural environment and conserve natural resources to support the wellbeing of current and future generations. Some important terms related are: reuse, reduce, repair, repurpose and recycle. (And some more R’s).These te...
As we navigate the internet, we don't usually think much or realize how our queries send a request to a server in a data center to retrieve the content. But the fact is, we don't live without data centers. Data centers host all the web pages in the world, all your bank information, health records, and basically everything that is digital. They run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, recording everything shared, transacted, and mentioned. There are approximately 8,000 data centers in the world, and with the rise of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud services worldwide, it is expected a growth rate of 10.9% a year by 2030. With the growth comes a cost. Data Centers have a proportionally big footprint. They account for approximately 1% of the energy consumed worldwide. The largest existent data center could power 80,000 U.S. households. The primary consumers are the cooling system, the IT system, and the electrical system. Depending on the energy source (solar, coal, w...