At Dembrane we are on a mission to empower every voice to participate in decisions that impact their community. To enable this at scale, we build tools powered by AI. We acknowledge that AI comes with an environmental cost - one that we must address responsibly.
The main contributors to our carbon footprint at Dembrane are related to the energy consumption of our product and to a lesser extent the travel of our team.
⚡ Energy consumption
We started this climate policy with framing the impact of using AI models. The result of this research you can find here, including all the source mentions:
Putting the carbon footprint of AI-usage in perspective.The key-takeaways are:
- The biggest contributor to the carbon footprint of AI models is the electricity consumption needed for the computing power.
- The carbon footprint of an AI model can be split into the training of the model and the usage of the model.
- Sending an email has about the same impact as asking an AI model a question.
- Addressing the global climate crisis requires systemic change.
The next steps we are researching at Dembrane are
- Quantifying the carbon footprint associated with the usage of our product.
- Green electricity procurement
- Supporting organisations working on climate change to facilitate systemic change.
🌍 Travel
Travel is close to essential in our current world. It is the basis of valuable knowledge exchange. To minimise our travel impact, we do the following:
- When possible, and always within the Netherlands, we travel by public transport. Our team receives travel budget for public transport, not for car travel.
- We try to minimise international travel by plane. International travel is sometimes required for fruitful international collaboration. However, we try to minimise international plane travel. We ask ourselves the questions whether the event can also be joined digitally? And if we physical go, if there is a reason to go with more than one person.
Currently this is the scope of our climate policy. This policy is continuously growing as the company is growing. If you have any remarks or disagreements with something mentioned in our policy. Please let us know!