The Future Impact of ICTs on Environmental Sustainability

Our world is getting smarter: smart homes, smart cities, smart grids, smart vehicles and logistics, cloud computing, crowdsourcing. Many smart solutions are today designed in a “Green IT” context and proposed with the intention to contribute to environmental or social sustainability. Such claims include, for example, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, saving energy, finding the most sustainable alternative in a decision situation, optimising a process with regard to sustainability criteria, or enabling participation and reducing poverty. However, it is difficult to determine whether the potential net benefit of the smart solution will materialize under real-world conditions, in particular when considering the dynamics of markets, possible rebound effects and other systemic effects. "Smarter" does not necessarily imply "more sustainable". The First International Conference of Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability (ICT4S), held in Zurich on ...

All contributions except the invited papers were selected by a two-stage blind peer-review process.

Telematics and Informatics, 2017

The positive and negative environmental impacts of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are widely debated. In theory, ICT is among the sources contributing to the increasing levels of CO 2 emissions in terms of production of ICT machinery and devices, energy consumption, and recycling of electronic waste. However, ICT is also expected to reduce CO 2 emissions on a global scale by developing smarter cities, transportation systems, electrical grids, industrial processes, and energy saving gains. These two effects work in opposite direction, creating an inverted-U relationship between ICT and CO 2 emissions. The aim of this study is to investigate this non-linear relationship between ICT and CO 2 emissions on a global scale. Given that global warming is a global issue, it is necessary to look at this relationship in countries at all levels of development. To this end, we use a panel data set consisting of 142 economies, split into 116 developing and 26 developed countries, over the period 1995 to 2010. The results of our empirical study confirm that the relationship between ICT and CO 2 emissions is an inverted U-shaped relationship. Moreover, while for the sample of developing countries, the ICT turning point is well above the mean value, the opposite is true for the sample of developed countries. This implies that many developed countries have already attained the level of ICT development, at which CO2 emissions decreases as the level of ICT development improves further.

This workshop brings together researchers from the entire iSchools community to propose, share and discuss their current research and future research agendas and foster collaborations on ICT for Sustainability. Sustainability as a research focus has inspired the creation of a number of workshops and conferences, including the International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (http://www.ict4s.org). ICT plays a major role in sustainability. It threatens sustainability as ICT devices cause carbon emissions, produce e-waste, but it can also be an enabler of sustainability [4], in form of systems that support the protection of natural resources, and that foster social sustainability, in the form of systems that foster communities and participation [8, 5]. These supporting systems come from many intellectual traditions within and beyond the information field (e.g., requirements engineering [9], software quality [10], life cycle analysis [6]) and design (e.g., sustainable HCI [1, 11]). As information scholars, we have a responsibility to work to ensure the survival of life on this planet, including humans as well as other rational agents, namely animals [2]. Sustainability is thus a critical value for ICT researchers to embrace and strive toward [3, 7, 12]. The iSchools community provides an excellent place to discuss this crucial topic at the intersection of information, society, and technology. This workshop will bring together scholars from across the information field studying ICT for sustainability, to foster new interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collaborations. 2 Proposed Format The workshop is planned as a full day workshop. We will solicit abstracts, papers, and/or position statements, and will set up easychair for managing submissions. Participant registration will be managed through the conference registration site. We will start the morning with a series of short presentations by the authors, each of them followed by a brief discussion. The audience will be engaged by guiding questions from the moderators to spark discussion. We will wrap up the morning session by summarizing the talks and connecting them to identify common topic areas and future research needs. For the afternoon sessions, we envision a series of breakout sessions that discuss selected common topic areas and future research needs. These breakout sessions shall facilitate the design of a future research agenda as well as the development of new research collaborations between the participants. The results from the breakout sessions will be reported back in a plenary wrap up session that outlines possible next Abstract This workshop brings together researchers from the entire iSchools community to propose, share and discuss their current research and future research agendas and foster collaborations on ICT for Sustainability. ICT plays a major role in sustainability. It threatens sustainability as ICT devices cause carbon emissions, produce e-waste, but it can also be an enabler of sustainability, in form of systems that support the protection of natural resources, and that foster social sustainability, in the form of systems that foster communities and participation. These supporting systems come from many intellectual traditions within and beyond the information field and design. The iSchools community provides an excellent place to discuss this crucial topic at the intersection of information, society, and technology.

3rd International Conference on Engineering and ICT (ICEI2012), 2012

This article portrays a critical issue of environmental pollution caused by the extensive use of high technology for ICT development process all over the world which creates a challenge for global sustainability. ICT infrastructures produce numerous environmental pollutions during of its production and disposal. Therefore, it is very important to discard the electronic waste in proper ways to ensure the sustainable environment by adoption of green technology. In this regard, this paper evaluates the energy consumption scenario in the field of ICT and its effect on environment. Following this issue depiction of green technology and its advancement along with a model has been proposed for green adoption which may ensure the sustainable environment. This paper also draws an attention of designing energy efficient computing system and ecoleveling ICT products which are 'feasible and economical', and minimizing the risk of human health as well as decreasing pollution towards the environmental sustainability. And finally current advancement as well as future challenges has been addressed in this paper.

Humans are a very innovative and creative species. This aspect above almost all others is responsible for the rise of humanity to be the dominant species of the planet. While there is a strong debate over how well humanity has handled the responsibility of being able to affect our environment and the legacy our actions will leave, it cannot be debated that we have created the tools to do it. One of the most pivotal and important creations mankind has achieved is its ability to communicate complex thoughts and principles and to then share them with future generations. It is this creation of information and the technologies it creates that allows us to feed people, teach people, house people from its inception to putting people on the moon and allowing instant global communications. It is the ability to communicate that defines us and in today"s world we have the creation of technologies that allows communications on a never before seen scale. However these technologies come with costs and those costs can harm us as much as they can help us. Finding a sustainable solution to the issues surrounding Information and Communication Technologies will enable humanity to use these technologies to better both mankind and the ecosystems it lives in.

2011

Sustainable development requires the decoupling of economic growth from environmental impacts and from the use of natural resources. This article gives an overview of existing approaches to using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the service of sustainability: Environmental Informatics, Green ICT, and Sustainable Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

Telecommunication networks have become as critical to the 21st century development as were railways, roads and canals, to the 19 Century developments and is now seen as enabler to a more sustained th business, environment and society as a whole. Still fascinating has been and is the exponential rate of growth in this industry. This is one sector where the next revolution is always just around the corner whether known or unknown. The telecoms industry is categorized by high rates of innovation in a rapidly changing technological environment. This in turn is associated with an immense range of sustainability concerns and challenges for the Telecoms service providers, the service users and the whole industry and it's far reaching influence on other industries. This paper discusses three key aspects of such challenges namely; the question of sustainable power/energy supply for the industry when the change is resulting in increasing energy and operational cost, the exploitation of technologies advancement for sustainability and their business and environmental benefits.

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2012

There is much evidence that the deployment of information and communications technologies (ICTs) can improve economic productivity, reduce energy intensity and exert downward pressure on renewable energy costs. While significant insights have been revealed about each of these effects in isolation, literature has not established their combined implications for carbon emissions. This article uses the International Futures (IFs) integrated assessment system (www.ifs.du.edu) to explore the dynamic impacts of ICT on interacting global systems, including economic and energy systems, and resultant carbon emissions. First, it reviews the literature on the various impacts of ICT; next, it extracts relationships from previously existing quantitative studies on the subject; third, it explains the addition of these relationships to the IFs structure; fourth, it explores the implications of the acceleration of ICT penetration; finally, it frames a range of uncertainty around the analysis through scenarios. The authors argue that ICT can have a downward impact on overall carbon emissions across a 50-year time horizon. However, the net impact of ICT is limited, and if policy makers are concerned with substantial reductions in overall stocks of carbon in the atmosphere, our model shows that ICT promotion must be coupled a global price on carbon.

Souter, D. and MacLean, D. (eds) Changing our Understanding of Sustainability: The Impact of ICTs and the Internet, 2012

Expectations are high that progressive innovation in information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be harnessed to sustainable development and, specifically, to environmental sustainability, goals. As environmental sustainability gains a high profile internationally, so too do hopes that digital technologies, globally interconnected networks, and increasingly inclusive Internet applications will lock ICT innovation into step with policy agendas aimed at curbing environmental threats.