Descripción del proyecto
Un análisis más detallado de la interrelación entre el cambio climático y las tecnologías de la información
Existe un vínculo entre el crecimiento económico y las emisiones de carbono. Si tenemos en cuenta que el producto interior bruto mundial está creciendo, resultará esencial romper este vínculo para alcanzar los objetivos climáticos. La respuesta pasa por desvincular el crecimiento económico de las emisiones de carbono. Cómo lograrlo es la cuestión. Algunos consideran que las tecnologías de la información (TI) desempeñarán un papel importante. Sin embargo, no todo el mundo está de acuerdo. En este contexto, el proyecto financiado con fondos europeos DecouplingIT estudiará cómo se generan cambios socioculturales en los espacios que existen entre las TI, el cambio climático y el capitalismo. En concreto, arrojará luz sobre cómo las empresas y los profesionales en TI articulan el cambio climático como un problema en demanda de un cambio generado por las TI. A pesar de que el cambio climático y las TI se manifiestan a nivel mundial de formas distintas, se debe estudiar su interrelación.
Objetivo
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.
Ámbito científico
Programa(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Régimen de financiación
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedInstitución de acogida
2300 Kobenhavn
Dinamarca