Kühn

Information and communication technology (ICT) is often praised for reducing emissions, however, data centres enabling these
technologies have a high energy demand which produces emissions due to CO2-intensive energy production. The purpose of
this paper is to investigate whether a relationship between ICT categories and air quality exists and how ICT affects it. This
will contribute to a greater understanding of how to mitigate the effect of the rise of new digital technologies.
This paper examines the effects of ICT aspects (Knowledge, Technology, Future Readiness) on air quality in 57 countries by
using multilinear regression. The results show that a linear relationship between ICT factors and air quality exists. Technology
has a negative effect on air quality, whereas Future Readiness has a positive effect. The effect of Future Readiness on air
quality is almost twice as high compared to Technology. A relationship between Knowledge and air quality, as proposed in
the literature, could not be proven by the model. It can be concluded that this combination of findings provides some support
for the conceptual premise that the net effect of ICT on air quality might be positive and that the share of the total carbon
footprint of the ICT sector might have been forecasted too high.