Projektbeschreibung
Der Zusammenhang zwischen Klimawandel und Informationstechnologie unter die Lupe genommen
Es besteht ein Zusammenhang zwischen Wirtschaftswachstum und Kohlenstoffemissionen. Da das globale Bruttoinlandsprodukt wächst, ist es für das Erreichen der Klimaziele von entscheidender Bedeutung, diese Beziehung zu kappen. Die Entkopplung des Wirtschaftswachstums von den Kohlenstoffemissionen ist die Antwort. Die Frage ist nur, wie. Manche sind der Meinung, dass Informatik und Technologien eine wichtige Rolle spielen. Aber nicht alle teilen diese Ansicht. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird das EU-finanzierte Projekt DecouplingIT untersuchen, wie der soziokulturelle Wandel im Spannungsfeld von Informationstechnologie, Klimawandel und Kapitalismus entsteht. Insbesondere wird es untersuchen, wie Informatikfachleute und -unternehmen den Klimawandel als ein Problem artikulieren, das einen technologiegestützten Wandel erfordert. Obwohl sich sowohl der Klimawandel als auch die Informationstechnologie auf weltweit unterschiedliche Weise manifestieren, muss ihre Wechselbeziehung untersucht werden.
Ziel
Climate change is one of the biggest existential issues of our time, and there is little global agreement on how to deal with it. Governments and private sector industries argue that ‘decoupling’ economic growth from carbon emissions is the best way to reduce climate impact while still maintaining a healthy economy. Yet, how to do so remains an unsolved question. Most proponents of decoupling see IT as playing a central role, whereas critics argue that IT itself is entangled with incessant capitalist growth and has a large and often unacknowledged climate impact. In addition, IT solutions frequently have the side-effect of creating new and unforeseen problems – social or climatic. The challenge of decoupling is thus broader than the management of the relationship between the economy and the climate. As much as decoupling is about how we imagine the climate crisis can be solved with technologies, trusting that they can create the changes we need, it is also about the cultural value of lifestyles that we do not want to change. The DecouplingIT Project thus approaches decoupling as a matter of how sociocultural change is generated in the spaces between IT, climate change and capitalism. We study these spaces through ethnographic explorations of how IT professionals and enterprises articulate climate change as a problem in demand of IT-generated change, and in particular how they practically deploy IT with the climate in mind. While both climate change and IT are manifested in globally diverse ways, their interrelationship must be studied comparatively with attention to how particular conditions in different locations give rise to disparate responses. Consequently, we conduct research in distinct but conceptually connected ‘climate-IT-hubs’ each facing climate change in their own ways. This addresses a major theoretical gap in qualitative social science research, namely how global change is driven through the intersecting roles of IT, climate change and capitalism.
Wissenschaftliches Gebiet
Programm/Programme
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thema/Themen
Finanzierungsplan
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedGastgebende Einrichtung
2300 Kobenhavn
Dänemark