Digital Sustainability Manifesto
Seven principles developed through research and reflection to guide a more responsible digital future.
The Digital Sustainability Manifesto is the result of ongoing research, interdisciplinary analysis and applied reflection developed within the Digital Sustainability Hub.
It emerges from a simple premise: as digital systems increasingly shape economies, institutions, markets and everyday life, sustainability can no longer be understood as a technical issue alone. It must include the environmental, social and economic consequences of how technology is designed, governed and used.
Digital sustainability is not about resisting innovation. It is about directing innovation with greater responsibility, clarity and long term balance.
The Seven Principles
01Technology Is Not the Enemy
Digital technologies can create extraordinary value. The central challenge is not technology itself, but how it is designed, adopted and used.
Sustainable progress requires critical adoption, not passive adoption.
02Not All Digital Is Equal
A digital technology is never introduced into empty space. Every concrete use reconfigures the way something is carried out: it redistributes who does what, with which information, at what pace, and under whose control.
No two uses reconfigure in the same way, and most do several things at once. Digital choices cannot be sorted into categories and judged by category. What matters is what a specific use actually changes.
03Effects Have Owners
There is no such thing as the impact of a technology. There is what it does to a specific actor carrying out a specific function. The same reconfiguration can strengthen a capability for one party and weaken it for another, and move control from one hand to another.
Read on one actor alone, it looks unequivocal. Read across all of them, it almost never is. Asking for whom is not a refinement of the analysis. It is the analysis.
04Business Models Shape Behavior
Many unsustainable outcomes are the result of incentives embedded in platforms, interfaces and commercial architectures.
When growth depends on excessive engagement, endless consumption or systematic data extraction, sustainability is weakened at its roots.
05Efficiency Is Necessary, but Not Sufficient
Greener infrastructures, better code and lower emissions are important achievements. Yet efficiency alone cannot correct systems built around waste, overload or unhealthy incentives.
Sustainability requires direction, not only optimisation.
06Human Beings Must Remain Central
Digital progress should strengthen human capabilities, not erode them. Attention, autonomy, wellbeing, accessibility and meaningful choice are conditions of a sustainable digital system, not secondary concerns.
What a technology allows a person to do matters as much as what it does to them.
07Awareness Begins with Visibility
What appears instant, weightless or free often depends on infrastructures, energy demand, extracted attention and hidden economic costs. Digital is not immaterial. It is invisible.
What remains invisible is rarely improved. Visibility does not decide anything on its own: it is where deciding becomes possible.
The future of digital should not only be smarter.
It should be sustainable.
Version 1.1, August 2026
The Digital Sustainability Hub recognises the contribution of the Sustainable Web community, whose principles helped stimulate early reflection in this area. This manifesto extends that perspective to the broader environmental, social and economic sustainability of digital systems.
The Manifesto as a Poster
The seven principles in a single image, for slides, walls and sharing.
