Working from home may not be as good for the environment as expected

Research says, telecommuting for four days would still be less effective than a 20% decrease in fuel efficiency

Working-from-home accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic might not be beneficial to Mother Earth as we initially would've though.

As it turns out, energy savings were offset by increased travel for recreation or other purposes, together with additional energy use in the home, says a new study quoted by IANS.

The majority of studies on the subject analysed by the University of Sussex researchers in the UK agreed that working-from-home reduced commuter travel and energy use - by as much as 80% in some cases.

"While most studies conclude that teleworking can contribute to energy savings, the more rigorous studies and those with a broader scope present more ambiguous findings," said study researcher Andrew Hook, Professor at the University of Sussex.

"Where studies include additional impacts, such as non-work travel or office and home energy use, the potential energy savings appear more limited - with some studies suggesting that, in the context of growing distances between the workplace and home, part-week teleworking could lead to a net increase in energy consumption," Hook explained.

"While the lockdown has clearly reduced energy consumption, only some of those savings will be achieved in more normal patterns of teleworking," explained study researcher Steven Sorrell.

"To assess whether teleworking is really sustainable, we need to look beyond the direct impact on commuting and investigate how it changes a whole range of daily activities," he added.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, provides a systematic review of current knowledge of the energy impacts of teleworking, synthesising the results of 39 empirical studies from the US, Europe, Thailand, Malaysia and Iran published between 1995 and 2019.

According to the researchers, even the mass migration of workers to home working might have only a small impact on overall energy usage. One study noted that even if all US information workers worked from home for four days a week, the drop in national energy consumption would be significantly less effective than a 20% improvement in car fuel efficiency.

The study also hints  that technological advances could erode some of the energy savings due to the short lifespan and rapid replacement of Information and communications technology (ICTs), their increasingly complex supply chains, their dependence on rare earth elements and the development of energy-intensive processes such as cloud storage and video streaming.

The authors added that modern-day work patterns are becoming increasingly complex, diversified and personalised, making it harder to track whether teleworking is definitively contributing energy savings.

The research was conducted by the Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS), a UK-based research centre, which tracks changes in energy demand.

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