Thank you, Rhun, for raising this important debate today. I fully support the proposals of this Bill, and I believe that we need to be much more forward thinking in our approach to policy that helps reduce our carbon footprint in technological areas, especially as we will be relying more heavily on digital data going forward into the future. It is only right that we put legislation into place that helps ensure that we are as efficient as possible with using and storing data and we have protocols in place, particularly within public bodies, to better share and remove data that is no longer needed.

As you may all recall, I recently spoke in the Chamber about dark data, and the truth is that, whilst we are investing huge sums of money to reduce carbon in industry, encouraging people to change behaviour, as well as changing the ways we heat our home and travel around, we are not actually addressing the elephant in the room—namely, we are adopting practices and embracing technological advances in our lives that are resulting in even more carbon dioxide being produced. For instance, nearly every mobile phone has a camera, which allows us to take movies and photos in a way we couldn't 10 years ago. We use apps that create data for fun, and we end up storing huge amounts that will never, ever be used again. Whilst I recognise that we should be doing everything we can to improve data storage and use in areas that we can influence, the inconvenient truth is that significant amounts of data will be produced in Wales and held on servers globally, and thus we are contributing to a production of carbon dioxide in places that we have no control over. For instance, data from our Apple phones is held in data centres in the US. We receive huge numbers of e-mails each day advertising promotions that we'll never, ever read, and these are held on servers in other countries that have to be powered and, more crucially, have to be cooled. We must also recognise the scale of this problem. Globally, more than half of all businesses have data that exists in a dormant or unused state, and it is estimated that 6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide will be produced annually just by storing this data, and this will never be used.

I finally want to say that, in terms of a Bill on digital carbon footprint, we also need to think about how we contribute to our global carbon emissions from data produced in Wales and stored abroad, and this will come from improving our understanding of how data flows through organisations and by creating policies that ensure our companies in Wales have processes in place that improve the visibility of dark data and better control our data storage. These policies then can also help companies and organisations to further comply with data privacy laws, such as the general data protection regulation. It is right that we introduce this legislation as soon as possible and that Wales makes a valuable contribution, because it is estimated that the amount of dark data stored worldwide will more than quadruple by 2025 to 91 ZB, which more than highlights the challenges ahead of us. Thank you, Dirprwy Lywydd, and I would urge all Members here to support this motion. Thank you.