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Hannah Smith

Introducing Hannah

Hannah is a freelance sustainable web consultant living in Exmoor, UK, with a background in Computer Science. She’s previously worked as a freelance WordPress developer specialising in working with SMEs, and also for the Environment Agency, where she managed large business change projects.

She’s now co-founder of Green Tech South West, founder of the #LetsGreenTheWeb campaign run with ClimateAction.tech, and a Green Web Foundation fellow. Aside from helping other technologists to take action on climate change, she also likes dogs, plants and snow sports.

Fellowship Project 

Hannah explored:
Can Doughnut Economics be used as a holistic way of exploring the digital tech sector’s impact on global sustainability?

When sustainability is discussed within the digital tech industry, the conversation often revolves around electricity use. Typically “how can we reduce electrical consumption in data centers or on end-user devices, and how can we decarbonise it?”.

This is great progress, but the industry is in danger of overlooking the big, more difficult questions.

Questions like: what exactly are those paradigms, systems and root causes that have got us into a rapidly warming climate? And how has this industry been culpable? And how does it continue to be culpable? What do we need to change?

DoingTheDoughnut.tech was conceived to support people within the digital tech industry to:

  • explore a broad definition of sustainability, which includes social as well as ecological issues;
  • look deeper into the root causes of what is going wrong;
  • imagine a better future for the industry.

The excellent Doughnut Economics framework is used as a vehicle to generate these discussions and understanding.

A full write-up of Hannah’s project

“Five things I learned”

What people thing building a sustainable internet means vs what’s it more about.

Hannah’s Fellowship Notebook