IGSD Director Prof Dorothea Kleine was invited by the United Nations to speak as a Senior Expert on the sustainability costs of digitalization. Prof Kleine was part of an international Group of Experts, the Digitalization for Development research network, in which senior researchers combined their interdisciplinary expertise in this report
The work was funded by the Robert Bosch Foundation and led by Prof Tilman Santarius at the Einstein Centre for Digital Futures/ TU Berlin. The report, titled 鈥淒igital Reset 鈥 Redirecting Technologies for a Deep Sustainability Transition鈥 calls for a greater focus on the climate impacts of digital technologies. It suggests options for regulation of harmful practices and business models and offers examples of pro-environmental use of transformative digital technologies.
Prof Kleine led on the global justice themes in the report. She spoke in the opening plenary of the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Ecommerce and the Digital Economy, convened by UNCTAD at UN Geneva. In her presentation Prof Kleine discussed the global justice implications of uneven digital transformation, as well as the climate justice implications if digital transformations were to remain on the current resource-intensive trajectory.