E-commerce warehouses and data centers are major vectors of concreting and soil artificialisation. In an article entitled “When the Internet concretes France”, Hélène Seingier and Floriane Louison denounce the artificialization of agricultural land and forests in favor of the construction of huge surfaces at the service of the digital economy.
Data centers : Internet pollution is very tangible
The Internet and new technologies sector represents approximately 3% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and the most tangible face of this pollution are the data centers. Our videos, our emails, our photos… All this immense digital production is stored in these warehouses of digital servers. And as the volume of data increases, the data centers are also multiplying. The latter are responsible for 4 to 15% of the overall impact of French digital technology, according to a 2020 study by GreenIT.fr.
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The most polluting aspect of data centers is their mode of operation, as well as their cooling, which consumes a lot of energy and water. The association Digital for the planet explains it very well on his website: “Some data centers only supply themselves with renewable energy to limit their impact. However, for others, the centers are powered by fossil fuels such as coal or gas.”
Need to preserve rural areas
As the authors of the survey explain, data centers present on French soil are mainly located in the Parisian suburbs, but the growing demand for storage is pushing the industry to build others on land that is now natural. Without regulation of this phenomenon, many agricultural lands are in danger of concretization.
People are reacting to this in different ways: on the one hand, civil society is mobilizing against land take; and on the other hand, legal steps are taken to reframe in the aftermath construction projects that endanger nature and cultural heritage, for lack of necessary regulation. Associations, such as the Terre de lien movement, go even further: to promote the preservation of agricultural areas in France, the organization buys land for “sanctuariser”. Thus, it can guarantee that these lands will never become logistics warehouses or data centers.
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Civil society has already succeeded in paralyzing constructions threatening to cement natural landscapes. This was the case in May 2021, the year in which the establishment of Amazon warehouses was canceled. This mobilization paralyzed the project to build a 38,000 m² warehouse in the town of Fournès, a few kilometers from the famous Roman aqueduct of Pont du Gard.