A Tale of Two Cities: Reflections on Digital Technology and the Natural Environment.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32835313.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1016/j.patter.2020.100068 and PMC identifier 7427557.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Contemporary digital technologies can make a profound impact on our understanding of the natural environment in moving toward sustainable futures. Examples of such technologies included sources of new data (e.g., an environmental Internet of Things), the ability to storage and process the large datasets that will result from this (e.g., through cloud computing), and the potential of data science and AI to make sense of these data alongside human experts. However, these same trends pose a threat to sustainable futures through, for example, the carbon footprint of digital technology and the risks of this escalating through the very trends mentioned above.