Sustainable Digitalisation

The digital revolution has transformed our lives and society with unprecedent speed and scale, offering immense opportunities and challenges. New technologies can make a significant contribution to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of the Agenda 2030, but positive outcomes cannot be taken for granted.

By means of a systematic literature review, the project intends to reflect on the key issues for a transition towards a responsible and sustainable digital. It aims to present, in an exhaustive and coherent manner, the impacts generated by IT equipment: from metals’ extraction, to the use of electronic device itself (e.g., energy consumption), up to its dismantling (e.g., waste management / recovery; pollution; exhaustion of non-renewable resources; etc.). The detailed study of the factors that allow us to identify the impacts (whether positive or negative) of digital transformation, permit us to better understand how digital tools can support companies and territories to grow sustainably. These issues are addressed to foster practice-oriented sustainable digitalization assessments regarding ethical and ESG consideration.

The main project objectives are:

• to define digital and to create a classification framework for digitalization’s tools;
• to address how to measure the positive and negative impact of digital into the economic, social and environmental domain;
• to list existing solutions to solve digital’s impacts;
• to understand where and whether digital’s impact changes from negative to positive and vice versa.