ABSTRACT
Innovations and efficiencies in digital technology have lately been depicted as paramount in the green transition to enable the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, both in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector and the wider economy. This, however, fails to adequately account for rebound effects that can offset emission savings and, in the worst case, increase emissions. In this perspective, we draw on a transdisciplinary workshop with 19 experts from carbon accounting, digital sustainability research, ethics, sociology, public policy, and sustainable business to expose the challenges of addressing rebound effects in digital innovation processes and associated policy. We utilize a responsible innovation approach to uncover potential ways forward for incorporating rebound effects in these domains, concluding that addressing ICT-related rebound effects ultimately requires a shift from an ICT efficiency-centered perspective to a "systems thinking" model, which aims to understand efficiency as one solution among others that requires constraints on emissions for ICT environmental savings to be realized.
ABSTRACT
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.patter.2021.100340.].
ABSTRACT
Digital twins emerged in the field of engineering but are now being applied in many areas of study. This article reflects on the enormous potential of digital twins of the natural environment and proposes an approach that builds on the massive legacy of process model understanding in this area combined with new insights from data understanding, including from AI/machine learning.
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we critique ICT's current and projected climate impacts. Peer-reviewed studies estimate ICT's current share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at 1.8%-2.8% of global GHG emissions; adjusting for truncation of supply chain pathways, we find that this share could actually be between 2.1% and 3.9%. For ICT's future emissions, we explore assumptions underlying analysts' projections to understand the reasons for their variability. All analysts agree that ICT emissions will not reduce without major concerted efforts involving broad political and industrial action. We provide three reasons to believe ICT emissions are going to increase barring intervention and find that not all carbon pledges in the ICT sector are ambitious enough to meet climate targets. We explore the underdevelopment of policy mechanisms for enforcing sector-wide compliance, and contend that, without a global carbon constraint, a new regulatory framework is required to keep the ICT sector's footprint aligned with the Paris Agreement.
ABSTRACT
Digital technology is having a major impact on many areas of society, and there is equal opportunity for impact on science. This is particularly true in the environmental sciences as we seek to understand the complexities of the natural environment under climate change. This perspective presents the outcomes of a summit in this area, a unique cross-disciplinary gathering bringing together environmental scientists, data scientists, computer scientists, social scientists, and representatives of the creative arts. The key output of this workshop is an agreed vision in the form of a framework and associated roadmap, captured in the Windermere Accord. This accord envisions a new kind of environmental science underpinned by unprecedented amounts of data, with technological advances leading to breakthroughs in taming uncertainty and complexity, and also supporting openness, transparency, and reproducibility in science. The perspective also includes a call to build an international community working in this important area.
ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been a drive toward more open, cross-disciplinary science taking center stage. This has presented a number of challenges, including providing research platforms for collaborating scientists to explore big data, develop methods, and disseminate their results to stakeholders and decision makers. We present our vision of a "data science lab" as a collaborative space where scientists (from different disciplines), stakeholders, and policy makers can create data-driven solutions to environmental science's grand challenges. We set out a clear and defined research roadmap to serve as a focal point for an international research community progressing toward a more data-driven and transparent approach to environmental data science, centered on data science labs. This includes ongoing case studies of good practice, with the infrastructural and methodological developments required to enable data science labs to support significant increase in our cross- and trans-disciplinary science capabilities.
ABSTRACT
Contemporary digital technologies can make a profound impact on our understanding of the natural environment in moving toward sustainable futures. Examples of such technologies included sources of new data (e.g., an environmental Internet of Things), the ability to storage and process the large datasets that will result from this (e.g., through cloud computing), and the potential of data science and AI to make sense of these data alongside human experts. However, these same trends pose a threat to sustainable futures through, for example, the carbon footprint of digital technology and the risks of this escalating through the very trends mentioned above.
