Descrizione del progetto
Uno sguardo più attento all’interrelazione tra cambiamenti climatici e tecnologie informatiche
Esiste un legame tra crescita economica ed emissioni di carbonio. Considerando che il PIL mondiale è in crescita, spezzare questo legame sarà fondamentale per raggiungere gli obiettivi climatici. La risposta è scindere la crescita economica dalle emissioni di carbonio. La domanda è come farlo. Alcuni ritengono che l’informatica e le tecnologie possano svolgere un ruolo cruciale, ma non tutti sono d’accordo. In questo contesto, il progetto DecouplingIT, finanziato dall’UE, studierà come si genera il cambiamento socioculturale negli spazi tra tecnologie informatiche, cambiamenti climatici e capitalismo. In particolare, si farà luce sul modo in cui i professionisti e le imprese del settore IT interpretano i cambiamenti climatici come un problema nella domanda di cambiamento generato dalle tecnologie informatiche. Sebbene i cambiamenti climatici e le tecnologie informatiche si manifestino in modi diversi a livello globale, è necessario studiarne le interrelazioni.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedIstituzione ospitante
2300 Kobenhavn
Danimarca