Technology is the great hope for those who fear environmental degradation has moved beyond the point of no return. Advancements in clean energy or scalable methods for scrubbing pollutants from the air and water could allow us to turn back the clock.However, with a growing global population, it won’t be enough just to shift the timeline via breakthroughs in the physical sciences. In order to preserve the natural resources required to sustain future generations, we need to fundamentally change the way we do things in society, and this is the great promise of Information Technology.
Technology is the great hope for those who fear environmental degradation has moved beyond the point of no return. Advancements in clean energy or scalable methods for scrubbing pollutants from the air and water could allow us to turn back the clock.
However, with a growing global population, it won’t be enough just to shift the timeline via breakthroughs in the physical sciences. In order to preserve the natural resources required to sustain future generations, we need to fundamentally change the way we do things in society, and this is the great promise of Information Technology.
We’ve all experienced the rapid progression of IT into our lives and the economy. There are some reading this who haven’t known life without e-mail, but there are even more who still remember what it felt like to use a rotary phone. The question is: Can we use the transformative power of IT as a platform for driving behavior change and innovation in sustainability? Or will we primarily use it to queue up the next episode of House of Cards?
In May 2012 this Issue in Focus highlighted a few examples of IT in the realm of sustainability, such as UPS’s use of telematics to improve efficiency and Unilever’s Open Innovation Platform for bringing together collaborators around the globe. We discussed how IT facilitates the sharing economy and smarter operations in the utility industry, and we also theorized how data and analytics could enable individuals and enterprises to become vastly more aware of their impacts on the planet.
With the relaunch of this content area as a year-round channel, we'll look more broadly and dive more deeply into the issues at hand. We’ll explore the role of emerging topics such as the personal data economy, and we’ll ask the experts to cut through the big data hype to explain what can be done with it today, what could be done with it tomorrow, and what needs to happen in between.
We’ve got contributions forthcoming from some of the biggest brands in IT and from smaller innovators with big ideas. So please stay in touch, send us your feedback, and check out this terrific Q&A with Lucid CEO Michael Murray, who says big data is like teenage sex. (His words, not mine!)
Published Aug 5, 2013 6pm EDT / 3pm PDT / 11pm BST / 12am CEST
Bart King is the founder and principal at New Growth Communications. He specializes in helping sustainability leaders develop thought leadership content and strategy