Want to save water? Start by deleting your old emails and pictures, the UK government suggests

The National Drought Group has several suggestions on how to save water during droughts. One tip is to remove old emails and photos stored on the cloud.

The National Drought Group is a commission assembled by the United Kingdom government to develop ideas on how to preserve as much water as possible, especially given the current water shortfall situation in the UK, which is being treated as a “nationally significant incident.”

According to the National Drought Group, England is currently experiencing prolonged dry weather following the driest six months to July since 1976.

“The current situation is nationally significant, and we are calling on everyone to play their part and help reduce the pressure on our water environment,” Helen Wakeham, the Environment Agency’s Director of Water and NDG Chair, says in a press release.

A lot is being done to reduce water spillage. For example, water companies have taken measures that have reduced water leaks by 41 percent compared to 1989. In addition, they’ve committed over £700 million to tackle leaks over the next five years.

To really make a difference, citizens have to play their part as well. According to the National Drought Group, there are numerous ways of saving water at home, including fixing a leaking toilet, installing a rain butt to collect rainwater to water the plants in the garden, taking shorter showers, turning off the taps when brushing your teeth, and avoiding watering a lawn as soon as brown grass appears.

However, the most remarkable suggestion for saving water at home is to delete old emails and photos stored in the cloud.

Indeed, data centers require substantial amounts of water daily, primarily for cooling purposes, to maintain the integrity of the data they store. The rise of AI applications like ChatGPT is leading to increased water consumption in data centers as well, as AI models require more processing power and therefore cooling. Depending on the size of the data center, the amount may range from several million to tens of millions of liters per day.

Deleting a few old emails and holiday photos probably isn’t going to help reduce the water usage in data centers much. However, if we all chip in and remove digital copies of emails and photos we no longer read or hardly look at, it may be worthwhile in the long run.