Samuel, G.; Lucivero, F.; Knowles, B.; Wright, K. Carbon Accounting in the Digital Industry: The Need to Move towards Decision Making in Uncertainty. Sustainability2024, 16, 2017.
Samuel, G.; Lucivero, F.; Knowles, B.; Wright, K. Carbon Accounting in the Digital Industry: The Need to Move towards Decision Making in Uncertainty. Sustainability 2024, 16, 2017.
Samuel, G.; Lucivero, F.; Knowles, B.; Wright, K. Carbon Accounting in the Digital Industry: The Need to Move towards Decision Making in Uncertainty. Sustainability2024, 16, 2017.
Samuel, G.; Lucivero, F.; Knowles, B.; Wright, K. Carbon Accounting in the Digital Industry: The Need to Move towards Decision Making in Uncertainty. Sustainability 2024, 16, 2017.
Abstract
In this paper, we present findings from a qualitative interview study, which highlights the difficulties and challenges with quantifying carbon emissions, and discusses how to move productively through these challenges by drawing insights from studies of deep uncertainty. Our research study focuses on the digital sector and was governed by the research question: how do practitioners researching, working or immersed in the broad area of sustainable digitisation (researchers, industry, NGOs, and policy representatives) understand and engage with quantifying carbon? Our findings show how stakeholders struggled to measure carbon emissions across complex systems, the lack of standardisation to assist with this, and how these challenges led stakeholders to call for more data to address this uncertainty. We argue that calls for more data to address this uncertainty obscure the fact that there will always be uncertainty, and that we must learn to govern from within it.
Keywords
Carbon emissions; sociology of knowledge; digital technologies; ICT; uncertainty; adaptive governance
Subject
Social Sciences, Sociology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
