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Our world is getting smarter: smart homes, smart cities, smart grids, smart vehicles and logistics, cloud computing, crowdsourcing. Many smart solutions are today designed in a “Green IT” context and proposed with the intention to contribute to environmental or social sustainability. Such claims include, for example, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, saving energy, finding the most sustainable alternative in a decision situation, optimising a process with regard to sustainability criteria, or enabling participation and reducing poverty. However, it is difficult to determine whether the potential net benefit of the smart solution will materialize under real-world conditions, in particular when considering the dynamics of markets, possible rebound effects and other systemic effects. Smarter does not necessarily imply sustainable. The First International Conference of Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability (ICT4S), held in Zurich on February 14-16, 2013, gathered more than 200 researchers and decision makers from 50 countries to exchange their insights about an effective contribution of ICT to sustainable development. The papers presented at the conference are contained in this volume. These contributions show the multi-facetted relationship between Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and issues of sustainability. First, although creating virtual worlds, these technologies are physically dependent on the supply of energy and scarce materials. How can we reduce the ecological footprint of ICT? (Sustainability in ICT) Second, ICTs are enabling technologies with the potential to increase the energy and material efficiency of production and consumption patterns and processes. Essentially depending on the socio-economic framework, they can support the decoupling of value crea¬tion from resource use instead of accelerating resource-intensive processes (Sustainability by ICT). Third, the computational models we can design and implement with the aid of ICT contribute to our understanding of complex systems. These models and the applications based on them support the creation and assessment of potential solutions to urgent problems, among them climate change (Sustainability Research by ICT). The following cross-cutting issues have been repeatedly addressed in the contributions to the ICT4S 2013 conference, thus defining the outline of a research agenda in the emerging field of ICT for Sustainability: 1. The power of software: How can we use the power of software to reduce hardware energy consumption? 2. Scarce materials used in ICT hardware: How can we reduce hardware obsolescence and close material cycles? 3. Smart energy use in buildings: How can we manage the energy used in buildings smarter and thereby reduce this largest fraction of our total energy consumption? 4. Sustainable behaviours and lifestyles: How can ICT be used to support users in making choices that contribute to sustainable development? The presentations and discussions of the conference are also available as podcasts and visual protocols via the website http://www.ict4s.org.
Hilty et al. (Tue,) studied this question.