10. Closing thoughts: Towards a greener, healthier and brighter digital future

“Old ideas got us here” - from a street-art poster in Copenhagen

UN Secretary-General António Guterres opened the 2024 UN Summit of the Future with a serious but optimistic message: “First, the state of our world is unsustainable and we cannot continue like this. Second, the challenges we are facing are solvable.” (United Nations 2024). The quote from Guterres encapsulates the message we have conveyed in the previous chapters: our current digital practices may be unsustainable, but more sustainable solutions exist, and now is the time to act on them.

At the same summit, world leaders signed a Pact for the Future, yet another statement of intent for a more sustainable global future. For the first time, a global agreement linked digital activities with a sustainable future in the Global Digital Compact. World leaders began to see the digital domain as an important element of a sustainable future.

The intersection of global sustainability challenges on a planet of 8 billion people and the rapid, ubiquitous development of digital technologies constitutes a twin transition in a historically unprecedented and unpredictable phase. It is hard to imagine where our efforts to prevent the climate crisis and its consequences will be in five, 10, or 25 years. It is equally hard to imagine technological development, its effects, and how societal demands will shape it. It is perhaps more true than ever that “old ideas got us here” and that we need to re-evaluate habits and practices on personal, organizational, and political levels.

We could require everybody to change their habits and way of life in order to achieve sustainable practices, but external pressure for radical change does not always land well. We all have automatic, instinctive biases in favor of what is known and familiar. It seems unnatural for most of us to question current practices that work well locally but hurt globally, to question what we have learned throughout our lives, and to develop new sustainable ways of thinking and behaving to replace the familiar but unsustainable ones we have learned through the education system.

Embarking on the near-impossible project of trying to get an overview of the many different professional discussions related to sustainability and digital development can feel like too big a project. But the challenges ahead require us to shift gears. On a more mundane level, it means that all of us need to actively work in our fields for more sustainable practices. We can solve global challenges, and digital technologies can provide us with the superpowers that can create lasting change for the better.

We hope that this book can contribute to an optimistic yet realistic approach that shows ways to navigate the huge changes we are facing, while also conveying an understanding of how to analyze and mitigate climate-related disaster scenarios.

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that, with access to the internet and artificial intelligence, we can delegate reflection and other forms of knowledge work to machines. From there, it is tempting to believe that we can achieve the same results without expending as much effort ourselves.

But this is a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation of what digital technology actually is. Meeting the major challenges ahead requires us to use all the resources available to us as individuals and as a society. This includes digital tools and methods, but only if we shape and develop them to minimize their negative and unsustainable effects and instead equip them with regenerative properties.

Therefore, it is important that you continue to build a strong knowledge base through practical experience and scientific literature, and that you educate yourself on professional norms and practices. It is also important to keep an eye on political initiatives such as legislation and democratic debates aimed at challenging bad habits, as well as on what is expected of IT professionals so they can help change them for the better.

We have covered a great deal of ground in this book, and it may at times have felt overwhelming with the many perspectives presented. Our intention has been to pleasantly surprise you, the reader, with the diversity of viewpoints on sustainability and IT that exist. We have certainly been surprised ourselves. We also hope that we have helped open your eyes to the wealth of methods, theories, and approaches emerging at this intersection, even if we have only touched on a small fraction of what is happening.

By now, the book should have given you insight into the multifaceted development of the field. It also reflects a deliberate methodological choice on our part: because digitalization is woven into so many processes, our reflections and efforts toward a more sustainable society must be as well.

A sustainable future places new demands on the IT professional. These include technical skills and understanding, the ability to grasp connections at a social and collective level, and an awareness of systemic interdependencies. We believe that the time is passing when the quality of digital innovations and services can be judged solely by narrow technical, functional, or economic criteria.

Throughout the book, we have presented many definitions of and approaches to sustainability, some more complex than others. In simple terms, sustainability can be understood as a description of what we can rely on being there in the future. Ideally, more thoughtful, curious, and self-aware digital practices can help ensure that what we value—and what IT supports—will continue to exist.

Thank you for reading. Now it is your turn to act for sustainability.