What is the relation between big data applications and sustainability? What is the net effect of improved efficiency versus increased resource consumption, who gets to measure this, and how?

Data-driven analytics applications are eating the world and transforming every domain. But the world is also being eaten up in a different way by several non-sustainable practices.

On Earth Day, we look at what we know about the relation between big data and the environment: how big data is used to measure sustainability and inform action, and what is the impact they have on the environment as a whole.

Analytics applications range from capturing data to derive insights on what has happened and why it happened (descriptive and diagnostic analytics), to predicting what will happen and prescribing how to make desirable outcomes happen (predictive and prescriptive analytics).

Each organization is on a different point along this continuum, reflecting a number of factors such as awareness, technical ability and infrastructure, innovation capacity, governance, culture and resource availability.

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