Key Message

ICTs offer promising solutions for enhancing our capacity to predict and track environmental changes and develop appropriate management and adaptation strategies.

ICTs and the Environment

Enhancing our environmental management capacity and avoiding unintended consequences

It is becoming increasingly clear that we are unlikely to avoid major environmental challenges resulting from unsustainable practices to date. The most prominent example, climate change, is already noticeably triggering changes in agriculture, the incidence of forest fires, flood and drought patterns, the movement of invasive species, and biodiversity, just to name a few.

Our best option in many cases will be to enhance our capacity to predict and track such changes, develop appropriate management and adaptation strategies, and plot a course toward better environmental management. The Internet and information and communication technologies (ICTs) are transformative technologies in that they put intelligence at the edges of networks, thereby maximizing users' capacity to create and adapt. Examples of such transformation include using ICTs to improve practices in agriculture and forestry; monitor air and water pollution; improve disaster warning and relief; improve the efficiency of the energy, transportation, and goods and services sectors; and harness social networking for transformative change. At the same time, the sustainability of these technologies must also be managed to avoid unintended consequences such as increased consumption and environmental damage from electronic waste.

The relationship among ICTs, innovation and the environment is often examined in terms of three distinct kinds of effects:[1]

ICT-enabled systemic effects could dramatically impact economic and social parameters such as the attitudes, expectations and behaviour of individuals as consumers, citizens and members of communities; the demand and supply of goods and services; organizational structures; production, distribution and service processes; and governance in the private and public sectors. From this perspective, the large-scale economic and social choices made by individuals, organizations and communities about how to use ICTs to change their structures and behaviours will play a potentially significant role in determining whether there is a successful global response to the challenge of achieving sustainable development.

IISD's Work to Date

Climate Change

Environmental Sustainability

[1] The Forum for the Future proposed an analytic framework based on a distinction between the first‐, second‐ and third‐order effects of ICTs in The Impact of ICT on Sustainable Development, European Information Technology Observatory, 2002.