8. What assessment has the Welsh Government made of the need for digital decarbonisation? OQ58620

Digital technologies can materially assist the necessary effort to decarbonise Wales. However, deployment can, of itself, create a carbon footprint. Sustainable digital decarbonisation is therefore the ambition of the digital strategy for Wales.

First Minister, more than 60 per cent of the digital data that firms generate is collected, processed and stored for single-use purposes only. This could include outdated spreadsheets, multiple near-identical images, or the thousands upon thousands of unread or stored e-mails that will never, ever be looked at again. This type of data is known as 'dark data' or 'unstructured data'. It currently produces 2.5 per cent of all global human-induced carbon dioxide emissions, which is more than the total aviation sector combined at 2.1 per cent. Worryingly, the volume of dark data is growing at a rate of 62 per cent a year, and the subsequent carbon dioxide that is produced is predicted to account for more than the aviation, automotive and energy sectors combined in only just a few years. Government policy and technological innovations focus primarily on tackling traditional carbon emissions and carbon sequestration without addressing the growing problem of dark data, but part of this Government's digital vision is to drive economic prosperity and resilience by embracing and exploiting digital innovation. With this in mind, First Minister, what steps are the Welsh Government taking to ensure that public bodies and private companies in Wales are putting mechanisms in place to address the carbon dioxide from dark data? Thank you.

I thank Joel James for that question. As it happens, because I make no claims to be an expert in this field, I was discussing that very issue with the chief digital officer for Wales very recently. I think it's an important question because it exposes an issue that in some ways has only come to the fore in public debate very recently. From the discussion I had, my understanding is there are two possible solutions to the point that the Member has made. First of all, there is a responsibility on those major companies that store data, including data stored in the cloud, to put into place actions that they could take already to reduce the storage of dark data and therefore to reduce its carbon imprint. In future, now that this is an issue that has come to greater prominence and greater understanding, when contracts are struck between public bodies and other businesses with the data provider, part of those new contract arrangements ought to be a way in which the fruitless storage of data that will never be used or seen again can become part of the contract you have with the provider, so that that data is disposed of in a way that does not lead to the adverse impacts that Joel James has highlighted this afternoon.

Thank you, First Minister.