ICT and Ensuring Environmental Sustainability

This paper explores how recent "revolutionary" changes in information and communication technologies (ICT) affect environmental sustainability, with an eye to the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) set up to ensure environmental sustainability in this century. The paper is part of a series of 7 essays by John Daly that address the role of ICT in meeting the MDGs; click here for access to the full series on the Development Gateway website.

The author points out that literature on ICT and the environment "focuses most frequently on the applications of the technology in environmental monitoring and within environmental projects." The intention of this paper is to examine "indirect, causal paths". For example, while focusing in this essay on MDG #7 (Ensure Environmental Sustainability), Daly begins the essay by looking beyond it. That is, he explores one issue that none of the MDGs addresses specifically: population growth. He urges attention to the fact that "greater population growth will complicate efforts to protect the environment", arguing that "in the right circumstances ICT can have many indirect effects leading to reduced population growth rates." He notes that population programmes have used communications media to affect knowledge of, attitudes about, and practices related to family planning techniques; ICT applications have also been used to improve the efficiency and productivity of organisations providing family planning services.

Another indirect way in which ICT supports development aims, Daly contends, is by playing a role in achieving a "weightless economy". The fundamental issue of sustainable development, he claims, is reducing the ratio between resource consumption and quality of life - that is, the efficiency with which society uses resources as it improves the standards of living. Without modern ICT, he suggests, it is not clear how society will achieve the political will to improve this efficiency, how it will develop and monitor the required policies, or how it will achieve the required improvements in physical processes. Furthermore, ICT can enable technological changes needed for the conservation of resources other than those specifically mentioned within the MDG context.

Again looking beyond the specific programming context - but with an eye to the specific indicators proposed by the United Nations for MDG #7 (click here to view a list) - the author suggests ICT can improve environmental sustainability by fostering:

• reduction in the costs of transactions carried out over distances
• the ability to obtain and manage (environmental) data on scales and in situations previously impossible
• the ability to conduct quantitative analysis (of environmentally relevant information) in real time at unprecedented depth
• the ability to communicate between public, civil society, government and the private sector with unprecedented coverage and efficiency, and
• the ability to control processes electronically, enabling great precision to be achieved in real-time control of complex systems.

Daly cites other ways that ICTs can be helpful to environmental sustainability, arguing that:

• ICTs make it possible for the first time in history to detect environmental problems at very large and very small scales.
• They permit unprecedented monitoring of environmental quality, and unprecedented accuracy in detection of the sources and projection of the development of environmental problems.
• ICT can be used to empower people with unprecedented understanding of environmental systems, and of the interplay between environment and development.
• ICTs can be used to allow unprecedented intensity of communication on such issues among all sectors of society
• Almost any intervention that can be identified to improve sustainability or reclaim degraded environmental systems can benefit from appropriate applications of ICT.

The author expresses concern that "the narrow views focusing on applications of ICT in environmental monitoring or natural resource protection projects have an important place, but reductionism taken too far will result in radical underestimates of the effects of ICT on the environment." Daly suggests that it is more important to environmental sustainability of development programmes to see that ICT is fully applied to agricultural and land use planning, to improving industrial processes and reducing industrial pollution, and to appropriate agricultural and silvacultural intensification. He suggests that it may be more crucial to understand the effects of the ICT revolution on trends of urban growth, and to incorporate such considerations in national planning, than to focus on ICT in planning for the sustainability of "environmental projects".