9. Towards a greener, healthier and brighter digital future
“Old ideas got us here” - from a street-art poster in Copenhagen
UN President António Gueterres 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 Gueterres encapsulates the message, which we in the previous chapters: our current digital practices may be unsustainable, but more sustainable solutions exist, and now is the time to act to implement them.
At the same summit, world leaders signed a Pact for the Future - which was (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 begun seeing the digital domain as an important element of a sustainable future.
The intersection of global sustainability for a planet with 8 billion people and the rapid and ubiquitous development in digital technologies, is a twin transition, which seems to be in a historically unprecedented dynamic and unpredictable phase. It’s hard to imagine where our efforts to prevent the climate crisis - and its consequences - will be in five, 10 or 25 years, and it’s equally hard to imagine technological development, its effects and how societal demands will shape it. It’s perhaps more true than ever that “old ideas got us here” and that we need to re-evaluate habits and practices on a personal, organisational and political levels.
We could require that everybody change their habits and way of life in order to achieve sustainable practices, but external pressure for radical change doesn’t always land well. We all have an automatic and instinctive biases in favor of the known, of the familiar. It seems unnatural for most of us to question current practices which work well locally but hurt globally, to question what we have learned throughout our life and to have to come up with new sustainable thoughts and behaviours to replace the familiar but unsustainable ones we have learned from 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 you, us and we 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 with this book we can contribute to an optimistic-realistic approach that shows ways to navigate through the huge changes we are facing, but that also conveys 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 also important that you yourself continue to build a strong knowledge base through experiences from practice and from scientific literature, and educate yourself on professional norms and practices. But it’s also important that you keep an eye on political initiatives such as legislation and democratic debates aimed at challenging bad habits, as well as what is expected of IT professionals so that 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.