This summer, the Sussex Humanities Lab, as part of our Experimental Ecologies cluster, is running a project focused on the challenges of decarbonising the digital. With a fabulous set of collaborators, including the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition, Hampshire Cultural Trust, Bloom & Wild, Greenly, and GreenPixie, we’re working capture and share some best practice in measuring and reducing carbon emissions, with some particular emphasis on digital carbon and cloud computing.
Key outputs will be:
- A case study about Hampshire Cultural Trust‘s sustainability journey, emphasising challenges and opportunities distinctive to the GLAM sector
- A case study about Bloom & Wild’s sustainability journey, emphasising ICT and Cloud
Decarbonisation must operate on a tight timeframe. The IPCC has established that global carbon emissions would need to peak and begin an unprecedented fall within the 2020-2025 period to have a reasonable chance of aligning with the Paris Agreement.
Across many sectors, despite ambitious net zero commitments, it remains challenging to interpret what climate transition means for day-to-day decision-making, longer-term strategy, or the interests and agendas of different stakeholders. The legal and regulatory environment is rapidly evolving, along with standards and certifications, and informal sectoral norms. Organisations’ capacity to interpret and to apply these to their own operations varies considerably, and where there are gaps, climate tech and climate consulting services are set to play a key role. It’s easy to get stuck in the phase of data collection, or trying to figure out what data to collect, and delay actual carbon reductions. Communicating climate risk and climate action with internal stakeholders is challeging too.
Unsurprisingly, we’re seeing a boom in commercially available climate-related expertise, on a variety of models. Buying in the right expertise can help clients to put evidence into practice. But there are plenty of questions around such engagements. Who can or can’t afford bespoke consulting engagements? To what extent can and should such expertise be automated and platformised? Can we reconcile tensions between a technical mindset (seeking optimal solutions) and a political mindset (making value judgments and trying to do the right thing)? How do state-of-the-art carbon analytics services fit into the broader picture of climate policy, climate justice, and the political economy of energy transition?
And, of course, what role might universities play in identifying digital decarbonisation methods and best practices, enriching these with interdisciplinary expertise, and getting them to the decision-makers who need them? How do we ensure that the legitimacy that academics can generate and confer is being deployed responsibly, within the wider ecology of decarbonisation knowledge and practice? Who is an expert on who is an expert?
In 2019, the University of Sussex joined many others in declaring a climate emergency. Democratising Digital Decarbonisation aims to balance action research with an exploratory ethos. In other words, we plan to make tangible contributions to net zero goals in the short term. At the same time, we fully expect to emerge from the project not only with a few new answers, but also with a few new questions. And we’re not just interested in producing new knowledge or new research agendas. We’re interested in knowledge exchange in the richest sense: in learning from one another; in nurturing learning within networks of collaboration, care and solidarity; and in valuing that knowledge not just wearing our professional hats on, but with our human hats too. We think this is a good approach to doing research in the middle of an emergency!
Project team:
- PI: Jo Walton (j.c.walton@sussex.ac.uk)
- Co-I: Josephine Lethbridge
- Olivia Byrne
- Alex Cline
- Polina Levontin
- Matthew McConkey
Funding:
- HEIF
- ESRC IAA (scoping: Mainstreaming Climate Transition)
- GreenPixie
- Greenly
Sussex Digital Humanities Lab Blog 