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Sustainability Threads at iPRES 2025 Wellington

  • ipres20254
  • 31 minutes ago
  • 4 min read

Guest post by Andrew Potter, https://metaarchivist.substack.com/

e-bikes along the Wellington waterfront.
E-Bikes along the Wellington waterfront. Photo credit: WellingtonNZ

The Carbon Cost of 'Forever'

As I pack for Wellington and the long-anticipated gathering of the digital preservation community at iPRES 2025, I keep returning to a simple, unsettling question: How sustainable is our notion of forever?


Sustainability isn’t the central theme of this year’s iPRES conference — but it’s there, woven quietly through the program in a handful of sessions that ask what it means to preserve digital memory in an era of ecological constraint. These sessions don’t just examine storage architectures or access models; they ask about energy, carbon, and impact. And for those of us who spend our professional lives working on standards and frameworks, that makes them worth our closest attention.


I’ll be in Wellington reporting on these discussions and facilitating my own brainstorming workshop on digital preservation standards, where I hope we can explore whether a sustainability dimension belongs — or even needs to belong — in future standards work.


Here are four sessions I’m especially looking forward to:

Monday, 3 November 2025 — Juha Lehtonen et al., CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland


Every few years, a session appears at iPRES that quietly reframes the landscape. This might be one of them. Juha Lehtonen’s team has developed a practical model for estimating the carbon footprint of a preservation service, using real vendor data and infrastructure metrics. It’s the first time I’ve seen a systematic attempt to treat energy and carbon as measurable properties of preservation activity — not as incidental side effects.


For years, the field has tracked fixity errors, format obsolescence, and audit compliance. But few repositories could tell you the environmental cost of keeping a terabyte of cultural heritage alive. This work changes that conversation. It invites us to think of integrity not only as data that remains uncorrupted, but as stewardship that doesn’t overdraw the planet’s account.


In a week when I’ll be leading a session on standards implementation, I can’t help but wonder: if we can measure carbon footprints, can we also standardize that measurement? Could OAIS, ISO 16363, or future frameworks acknowledge the environmental cost of the “long term”?


Wednesday, 5 November 2025


This informal Birds-of-a-Feather discussion builds on a growing recognition that the climate crisis is no longer a distant backdrop — it’s an operational reality. Data centres face increasing cooling loads and weather-related downtime. Power grids fluctuate. In some regions, rising sea levels threaten entire facilities. At the same time, our own digital infrastructures consume vast energy resources. It’s preservation in the Anthropocene, and of the Anthropocene.


Expect this session to touch on two intertwined perspectives:

  • Adaptation: How do repositories maintain resilience as physical risks mount?

  • Mitigation: How can digital preservation reduce its own environmental footprint?


I’m particularly interested in how this conversation connects to governance and policy frameworks. The next step is not just to share anxieties — it’s to codify responsibility. That’s where standards come in: defining measurable, reviewable practices that embed sustainability in daily operations rather than aspirational statements.


Thursday, 6 November 2025 — National Digital Stewardship Alliance Working Group The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation have long served as a pragmatic benchmark — a living checklist for repositories at every maturity level. This revision introduces an Environmental Sustainability Guide, encouraging institutions to assess energy efficiency, hardware lifecycle management, and infrastructure choices alongside access and authenticity.


It’s a subtle but significant evolution. When sustainability becomes part of the Levels, it’s no longer a niche concern — it’s something practitioners will have to report on, budget for, and plan around. The result isn’t moral posturing; it’s operational realism. We all know digital preservation has a carbon cost. The NDSA is simply making it part of the metrics.

Facilitated by Andrew Potter, MetaArchivist Consulting


This is the session I’ll be facilitating — an interactive roundtable on how we implement and improve digital preservation standards. Using sticky notes, structured brainstorming, and shared critique, we’ll surface what makes standards both indispensable and difficult to use.


Although the primary focus is usability, I’m hoping the discussion will also touch on sustainability — whether standards might someday address the resource, energy, and carbon implications of preservation activities. It’s not yet part of the formal brief, but I suspect the community is ready to start asking: if we can standardize trustworthiness, why not sustainability?


Why these threads matter

Together, these sessions form a subtle but important narrative: the recognition that digital preservation cannot remain ecologically neutral. They challenge the idea that we can sustain infinite replication in a finite world, and they point toward a future where responsible persistence replaces perpetual accumulation.


For those of us involved in standards work, the implication is clear: sustainability may not yet be codified, but it’s on the horizon. We can either wait for it to arrive or begin defining what it looks like — with measurable, transparent practices that align preservation with planetary stewardship.


Looking ahead for Wellington

Wellington, perched between rising seas and sharp green hills, feels like the right place to rethink permanence. The Māori concept of kaitiakitanga — guardianship of both knowledge and environment — reminds us that preservation and sustainability are twin obligations, not competing ones.


I’ll be reporting from these sessions throughout the week — capturing field notes, conversations, and reflections on how the digital preservation community might evolve from sustaining data to sustaining stewardship. Originally published on Andrew Potter's Substack, metaarchivist.substack.com, 23 October 2025.

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