As England reels under its fourth major heatwave of the year and drought conditions choke the nation’s reservoirs, the UK government has delivered a baffling piece of environmental advice: delete your old emails and digital photos to help conserve water.

In a press release on August 12, the Environment Agency told the public a list of things they can do to help, including “turn off a tap or delete old emails” to aid the “collective effort” in easing water shortages. This guidance, parroted by the National Drought Group (a coalition of agencies and industries) comes in the context of a real, climate-driven problem. Water reserves are dwindling, farmers are suffering, and wildlife is at risk. But officials telling people to empty their inbox isn’t just a bit rich. It’s stunningly hypocritical.

A Real Crisis Meets a Hollow Solution

To be clear: the UK is experiencing a legitimate environmental emergency. According to government data, reservoir levels have fallen to 67.7%, well below the August average of 80.5%. Five regions are officially in drought. Six others are classified as experiencing “prolonged dry weather.” Grasslands across the country are getting parched while crops are starting to fail.

And yes, data centers, which have become the physical backbone of our digital lives, do use water. Often, they use a lot of it. Some centers employ evaporative cooling systems, which can consume millions of liters of water annually to keep server racks from overheating. A 2023 estimate put consumption for a small center at 25 million liters per year.

So, the idea that our digital world has a real impact on water consumption is true.

But the advice to “delete old emails” as a frontline drought intervention? That’s where the logic breaks down — and fast.

Most cloud data, especially your old photos and emails, lives on high-density, low-power hard drives or archival tape. These use very little energy, and in some cases, almost none at all when idle. Secondly, deletion isn’t immediate. Files persist for weeks or months after deletion, usually system similar to a “recycle bin”. Only when data is overwritten, and only if it leads to hardware decommissioning, is any energy (or water) actually saved.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s the “flows” of data that use up the most resources, not the “stocks.” In other words, the real environmental cost of digital life comes not from what you keep, but what you do. Watching an episode of a Netflix show uses as much energy as storing 50 GB of photos for a year. Using AI tools, video conferencing, TikTok scrolling — these “live” activities are far more resource-intensive.

How Much Water Does Deleting a Photo Actually Save?

Let’s do some rough math. These are all just ballpark numbers so that you understand the scale of what we’re talking about.

Storing 50 gigabytes of images and videos, the rough size of an average personal photo library, uses about 8.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per year. An average fridge uses between 100 and 800 kilowatt-hours per year.

In water terms? Assuming conventional power plants are used (which require cooling water to produce electricity), this might translate to a few liters of indirect water use per year. Maybe. And only if that data is stored on a spinning disk in a data center that uses evaporative cooling and hasn’t already moved it to a low-power archive tier.

If you’d delete your entire digital archive, it would matter about as much as not brushing your teeth one time or skipping an episode of your favorite show.

By contrast, skipping a single hamburger saves around 2,400 liters of water — the amount needed to grow the grain, raise the cattle, and process the meat. Even choosing a plant-based meal one single time can save more water than deleting your entire email inbox, and by one or two orders of magnitude. Swapping out dairy milk for oat milk saves about 120 liters per liter consumed, and a single avocado requires more water to produce than an entire gigabyte of data consumed in a year.

If water conservation is the goal, the contents of your plate matter orders of magnitude more than the contents of your cloud storage.

Downloading data is a bit more significant. Using around 1 GB of data (around 1 hr of continuous TikTok usage) can use around 200 liters of water.

But deleting photos is nothing more than a digital pat on the head. That’s also rich coming from officials.

It’s Not Just Bad Advice. It’s Rich with Hypocrisy

The UK government is putting the onus on citizens to fix a problem driven by decades of systemic neglect. The real culprits (in addition to man-made climate change) are chronic underinvestment in infrastructure, excessive water leakage, and the rising demands of high-intensity computing — particularly AI.

As of this year, water companies are losing billions of liters of water daily through leaks. A single company has saved the equivalent of 75 Olympic-sized pools a day by fixing known leaks, and many more such interventions are necessary. If you’re looking for digital culprits, just look at AI, which many governments (including the UK are pushing intensively).

Several new, large, water-thirsty data centers are being constructed in the UK. All of this is spearheaded by the government itself, which is even giving some big tech companies tax cuts. And that’s where the hypocrisy really lands.

At the same time the government is urging citizens to delete old vacation photos, it’s also ramping up support for AI and digital innovation as growth engines for the economy. In 2024, the UK touted itself as a global hub for AI development, courting big tech firms to expand data infrastructure nationwide. More AI means more server farms. More server farms mean more water. You don’t need a degree in environmental science to see the disconnect.

What Actually Works

Other advice issued in the same release include “a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden” and “use water from the kitchen to water your plants.”

That’s just another band aid. If we’re serious about curbing the environmental cost of digital infrastructure and easing pressure on water supplies, here are some things that actually matter.

• Fix the leaks. It’s boring. It’s not digital. But plugging infrastructure gaps saves more water than all the email deletions in the world. This works for individual households, too. A leaky toilet can waste 200–400 liters/day.
• Go plant-based more often. Food choices matter. Skipping a single beef burger saves hundreds of times more than deleting your photo backups. During a drought, what’s on your plate counts more than what’s in your inbox.
• Target the big players. Data centers run by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are the ones drawing gigaliters of water. Public pressure should focus on their water usage, transparency, and energy sourcing.
• Extend the life of your devices. The most water- and carbon-intensive part of your digital life is often not your data, it’s your device itself. Keeping your phone or laptop just one extra year can reduce its environmental footprint by close to a third.
• Promote efficient AI. Require disclosures on energy and water use for AI training. Encourage low-impact model design.
• Stream smarter. Streaming one hour of HD video uses as much energy — and therefore water — as storing 50 gigabytes of data for an entire year. Watching in standard definition or downloading content for repeat viewing can cut your digital footprint significantly.
• Support environmentally conscious policymakers. Let’s face it, our personal decisions won’t do much of a difference if the people in charge don’t give a damn.

All the other boring stuff, like buying less stuff you don’t need, driving less, and using renewable energy when possible, is very useful. They’re real-world decisions that ripple across supply chains, often saving thousands of liters per action.