In case the message isn't clear enough: sending an A4 letter emits about 25g of carbon dioxide; an e-mail with an attachment is 50g—double—and without an attachment, 0.3g. And e-mails and attachments account for 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. So, think carefully about the content of the e-mail or the attachment, or even about sending the e-mail at all. I find the prospect of becoming more productive by thinking more environmentally to be something quite exciting.

And decisions we can all take involve much more than how many e-mails we send. Do we take a photo or a video on our phones? A photo takes up less storage space. How long do we store that data for? Do we take dozens of pictures at a time and never purge our albums? That has an impact. Not much if we break it down as individuals, but that's the whole thing about tackling climate change; it’s the collective.

One expert in this field from the M-SParc science park on Ynys Môn suggested to me that you can look at it in terms of our digital consumption and digital retention. We need to think about how much we consume in the first place—how much storage space we need to create for that video or that file or that e-mail or whatever, and then the extent to which we make long-term use of that storage space by not having good housekeeping measures in place to delete things in good time. Again, legislating to mandate assessments of digital carbon footprints of storage, for example, for any organisation could encourage that good practice. We can't just be hoarders of digital content and think there's no consequence to that.

And of course there's space that we absolutely need to use up. The development of new artificial intelligence models—hugely intensive in computing power and data storage space. But, we need to be doing that, so we need to shed more of the unnecessary stuff, but we also need to be less carbon-intensive in the way that data centres are run to store that data. Many will need to move to places where it's colder. Shifting into night-time use will save on energy costs but won’t help the environment, but shifting to powering from renewable sources does address that. And there’s a potential for Wales with our abundance of renewable energy there. At the same time, we need to learn the lessons of countries like Ireland, who face growing concerns over the amount that renewable energy data centres are consuming. Again, legislation could help focus minds.

I really could go on, but I'll stop there for now. I think I'm right in saying that this is the first time we’ve had this kind of debate on this kind of topic, and I look forward to Members’ contributions, as we try to give this issue much more prominence, and hopefully, get some legislation behind it, too.