Description du projet
Un examen plus attentif de la corrélation entre changement climatique et TI
Il existe une corrélation entre la croissance économique et les émissions de carbone. Étant donné que le PIB mondial augmente, la rupture de ce lien s’avèrera cruciale pour atteindre les objectifs climatiques. Dissocier la croissance économique des émissions de carbone constitue la solution. Il s’agit à présent de savoir comment procéder. D’aucuns voient les TI et les autres technologies y jouer un rôle de premier plan. Mais tout le monde n’est pas d’accord sur ce point. Dans ce contexte, le projet DecouplingIT, financé par l’UE, étudiera les mécanismes qui génèrent un changement socioculturel aux interfaces entre les TI, le changement climatique et le capitalisme. Plus particulièrement, il mettra en lumière la manière dont les professionnels des TI et les entreprises envisagent le changement climatique comme un problème dont la solution passe par un changement induit par les TI. Bien que le changement climatique et les TI se manifestent de différentes manières dans le monde, leurs corrélations doivent absolument être étudiées.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Régime de financement
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedInstitution d’accueil
2300 Kobenhavn
Danemark