The Sustainability Imperative

Christina Bidmon, Laura Piscicelli, and Iryna Susha, along with Devin Diran, Francesca Ciulli, and Albert Meijer provide four core messages. First, that a successful twin transition requires rigorous conceptual and empirical research that provides us with the tools and insights to help navigate the complexities of the transition. Remarkably, the second core message entails a warning to stay clear of tech optimism, which speaks directly to issues related to unintended consequences. Digital innovation can be the key to sustainability but will not solve all our problems — often, other approaches and nature-based solutions should be prioritized. Third, Bidmon et al. highlight the need to understand the factors that facilitate or prevent collaboration for digital sustainability. Finally, the authors point out that neither policies nor businesses can achieve the twin transition alone; rather, comprehensive policies are needed to provide smart incentives for businesses to engage responsibly.

Aspen Institute Fellow Alessia Falsarone sheds light on an often-overlooked aspect of digital sustainability: the digital talent needed to manage digital sustainability solutions. Unlocking the benefits of digital sustainability and managing its unintended consequences requires the right digital talent. Falsarone’s best practices for growing the talent pool for digital climate transformations include: (1) identifying climate-resilience skills and capabilities, (2) leveraging collaborative tools and research for learning, and (3) embracing AI and feedback for advancement. Finally, going beyond the perspective of a single firm, she presents best practices for building and leveraging stakeholder networks for digital talent: leveraging living laboratories, fostering diverse networks, and championing collaborative initiatives.

Damla Diriker and Amanda J. Porter team up with Ilse Hellemans from the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) to show how we can use digital innovation for mission-oriented innovation policies. Based on several years of research and practice, they present crowdsourcing as a vehicle for mission-oriented policies. The ability of digital innovation to leverage the “wisdom of the crowd” facilitates policy agenda-setting because it allows initial broad exploration and refinement into sub-challenges. It also promotes solution development through targeted experimentation and broadens the scope of experimentation. Finally, it facilitates policy implementation by collecting local insights on planned interventions and testing and gathering feedback on implementing interventions.

This issue of Amplify offers a set of insightful articles from leading researchers and practitioners working on digital innovation for climate action. They share a common message: digital innovation can be the key to accelerated climate action if managed correctly. Of course, it will lead us directly to climate disaster if used irresponsibly. Applying the carefully crafted frameworks presented in this issue can help us avoid the latter and enable the former.

This Advisor provides an overview of how AI-powered platforms are radically transforming wildlife conservation and explores key application domains and use cases. These technologies also facilitate greater collaboration among the global conservation community.

Europe has an urgent need to decarbonize, but its progress lags other regions, including the US, Australia, and Japan. This Advisor examines the current state of carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies in Europe and explains how some countries are increasing their carbon-capture capacities.

To illustrate the benefits of our dynamic pricing approach over other benchmarks, we carried out several computational studies and a case study using Share Now data from the city of Vienna, Austria. As this Advisor explores, that approach outperforms all benchmarks, saves providers operational costs, and improves sustainability via clear decarbonization benefits.

Companies are applying AI, computer vision, machine learning, and robotics to develop intelligent recycling platforms that enhance the efficiency and profitability of the recycling process. This Advisor examines some of these emerging technologies.