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Green Surveillance: Imagining a Sustainable Internet of Things

Project description

IoT-mediated ‘green surveillance’ to promote climate and social justice

The Internet of Things presents the opportunity to monitor human behaviours and their impact on Earth’s ecosystems, supporting a transition to more sustainable processes, actions and activities. However, it is unclear the extent to which citizens will accept IoT-mediated surveillance and monitoring by national and international systems of governance as well as individuals, consumers and corporations to support climate, environmental and social justice. The ERC-funded GREENWATCH project aims to anticipate and assess the ethical dilemmas that follow from ‘green surveillance’ with empirical scenarios projected in Europe, the United States and China – the three world regions driving IoT development. Outcomes could lay the foundations for ethical IoT-based human monitoring.

Objective

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) constitutes a communication system that enables comprehensive and continuous monitoring of the effects of human activity on Earths ecosystems, thus potentially facilitating the green transition to sustainable forms of social life. But the scope and the scale of the necessary monitoring simultaneously entails surveillance, not only of natural and built environments, but of persons and their actions as well, extending far beyond the online tracking of citizens and consumers which over the past decade has generated widespread public debate and motivated substantial legislation regulating digital infrastructures in the European Union and beyond.

The GREENWATCH project anticipates and assesses the ethical dilemmas that follow from green surveillance: What kinds and which degrees of surveillance will the present human cohort be prepared to accept in the coming decades to ensure the livelihood of the species centuries and millennia into the future? Comparing the three world regions driving the development of IoT Europe, the United States, and China the study maps the empirical scenarios being projected for IoT as part of the green transition; theorizes the process of green surveillance as information feedback to national and international systems of governance as well as to individual citizens, consumers, and corporations; and evaluates both the scenarios and the practice of surveillance against the background of classic philosophical traditions of local and global social justice, complemented by recent conceptions of climate justice and environmental justice. Through IoT, Earth is sending a message that the human species is obliged to respond to, across ideological and civilizational divides, for survival and, at best, individual and collective human flourishing (eudaimonia).

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Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2023-ADG

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Host institution

KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 2 500 000,00
Address
NORREGADE 10
1165 KOBENHAVN
Denmark

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Region
Danmark Hovedstaden Byen København
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 2 500 000,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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