Incorporating Animals as Stakeholders in ICT: Towards Truly Inclusive Digital Sustainability

The digital revolution has driven unprecedented technological advancements, transforming modern life and addressing global challenges. However, while sustainability efforts in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are addressing environmental issues like energy consumption and carbon footprints, the ethical implications for non-human animals remain largely unexplored. This position paper calls for a redefinition of sustainability in ICT to include animal welfare as a core principle. We argue that animals should be recognized not only as indirect stakeholders impacted by technological progress but as direct beneficiaries of ethical digital practices. For the first time, we propose the concept of vegan digital product, also introducing an interdisciplinary methodological framework that prioritize animal welfare in digital design and policy-making. Particularly, the framework incorporates animal welfare as a scope-based non-functional requirement in ICT projects, including a draft for quantitative metrics based on the Value of Statistical Life (VSL).