The Hidden Environmental Cost of Our Digital Lifestyle
The Metaverse industry is booming around the globe, with countries like the US, Japan, China, Canada and New Zealand leading the way in terms of user adoption. According to Statista, by 2024, the revenue generated by Metaverse projects will exceed the threshold of $74.4 billion. The annual growth rate between 2024 and 2030 is expected to reach 37.73%, which, in turn, will lead to a projected market volume of $507.8 billion by 2030.
These numbers perfectly show how fast the virtual world, and particularly the Metaverse, is growing, with new digital experiences and immersive technologies becoming available to the general public. Today, people can easily use VR headsets to visit a variety of different environments – from safe casino venues to sci-fi cities and fantasy worlds.
But is Metaverse entirely safe in terms of environmental risks? Does it have any negative effect on our surrounding world? In this article, we will look into all these questions.
What is Metaverse – A Brief Overview
Before going down to our main topic, let’s first understand what the Metaverse is. In simple terms, the Metaverse is a convergence of digital, augmented, and virtual worlds, where users are represented by avatars. The concept of the Metaverse traces back to 1992 when Neal Stephenson published his science fiction novel Snow Crash. In his book, humans are introduced as programmable avatars who can interact with software agents and communicate with each other in a three-dimensional virtual space.
Later on, the concept of the Metaverse was discussed in many other sources and gradually started to take shape in the last couple of years after Facebook was rebranded as Meta in 2021 and introduced several Metaverse features. These include Horizon Workrooms, Horizon Worlds, and Horizon Venues. And as the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, defines, Metaverse is the successor of the mobile internet and the next evolution in social connection.
Actually, you can visit the Metaverse even with your smartphone; however, in this case, you will have quite limited features. In order to have a fully immersive experience, you will need VR headsets, AR (Augmented Reality) glasses and a computer with good memory and HD graphics.
In general, the term Metaverse can be applied to any 3D virtual space that is powered by such technologies as AI (artificial intelligence), VR (virtual reality), IoT (the Internet of Things), AR (augmented reality), and blockchain and which enables people to interact with each other through non-human avatars. Simply put, it is a virtual world.
Through Metaverse, you can communicate and interact with other real people, travel to your desired destinations, play various real-like games, go to concerts, or buy virtual lands with crypto.
The Role of Metaverse in Environment – Positive and Negative Effects
According to Business Wire, by 2026, it is expected that the virtual reality market will grow to $16.12 billion. This shows that many people will likely spend their time in digital realities on a daily basis, which will drive up the activity of data centers and their corresponding carbon emissions. This, in turn, may have some detrimental effects on the environment.
According to Data Quest, the Metaverse may lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Metaverse companies will need big data centers to accommodate a growing number of users and support vast amounts of computing power. This, in turn, will require pretty big amounts of energy. For example, a planned data center of Meta in the Netherlands, in order to host a part of the Metaverse in Europe, requires an annual energy consumption of 1,380 gigawatt-hours.
This data center alone can consume almost half as much energy as all data centers in the country combined. On top of this, the average person using the Metaverse will need a computer with a high-spec graphics card to access and run the VR world. In addition, there is the energy demand required for powering VR headsets.
To delve deeper into this topic, in 2019, a UK-based digital transformation consultancy, ECS, conducted research and found out that the training of a single AI model can produce approximately 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide. This number is actually five times more than the amount of greenhouse gas a single car can emit during its entire lifetime.
However, there are some positive environmental effects as well. Based on the study “Growing Metaverse Sector Can Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 10 Gt CO2e in the United States by 2050” by Ning Zhao and Fengqi You, the Metaverse can bring down the same greenhouse gas emissions to some extent thanks to its ability to decrease the need for personal and business travels. For example, in the Metaverse, you can hold meetings for hundreds of people in a digital hall without going out of your house.
However, as the data provided by Statista shows, in 2021, the number of people accessing and using Web 3.0 virtual worlds was 50,000 in total. This number can’t be considered high, so the possibility of switching entirely to virtual worlds in the upcoming years is still under question.
What’s the Solution
Currently, it is up to leading corporations like Microsoft and Facebook to find eco-friendly solutions for creating their virtual realities. They have already promised to develop strategies to achieve net-zero emissions.
However, smaller companies are not left out of the issue as well. For example, software firms, data centers, mobile payment application developers and hardware companies can make their products more efficient. This can be done by utilizing energy-saving processors or by designing their facilities to use fewer resources to reach the same performance level.
