Is there a role for knowledge management in saving the planet from too much data? [Editorial]

From a societal perspective, the huge growth in data being generated by organisations is clearly correlated to technological advancements enabling far greater capacity for data acquisition and storage (e.g. data centres) than has ever been previously available. Data centres alone account for 3% of the global electricity supply and consume more power than the entire United Kingdom (UK), contributing 2% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions (Bawden, 2016). The ‘store it all’ approach adopted by many organisations as evidenced in the migration to the cloud, for instance, is a significant threat to the pursuit of net-zero, given that the energy sector already accounts for 35% of total global emissions (UN, 2022). [...]