A Digital Green Deal would aim to ensure coherence between sustainability policy and digital policy initiatives.
This requires addressing and integrating three aims:
- First, policies should reduce the environmental footprint stemming from lifecycle effects of digital technologies. For instance, design directives can establish environmental standards for hardware production, require manufactures to increase the share of recycled materials and reused parts, and require devices to be designed modular and repairable. Moreover, hardware companies can be incentivized to change their business models from selling to letting (device-as-a-service). To reduce impacts during the use phase, policies should set clear and ambitious energy standards for devices and data centers, ensuring constant improvement of those standards over time.
- Second, sustainability policies should foster the development and application of digital solutions that aim to spur genuine transformations in systems of provision and distribution while simultaneously minimizing usage of digital innovations that are counterproductive from an environmental perspective. Digital opportunities and risks should be addressed in a cross-cutting manner, for instance in legislation on circular economy, governance of value-chains and corporate accountability requirements. Opportunities and risks should also be addressed in sectoral policies, thereby advancing sustainability transformations in energy, mobility, agriculture, building/housing, industry, and consumption of goods and services whilst not setting back social issues. For example, transport policy-making should not leave the governance of vehicle automation to ethics commissions or data governance initiatives alone but proactively develop initiatives to support communal or private mobility providers (e.g., transport associations) in the bundling of vehicle automation and car sharing in a wider Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) environment. In general, governance should ensure that a digitalised solution provides an added value compared to a non-digital one. Also, risks of digital failure caused either by unpredictable environmental events or malevolent actors (e.g., cyber-security attacks) must be assessed and countermeasures configurated.
- Third, digital policies should include elements that serve sustainability goals. For example, most platform markets lack ‘production standards’ – there are neither energy standards for video streaming or social media platforms, nor are services on rental or sharing platforms bound to contribute to low-energy housing or reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in transportation. Since even comparatively strong platform legislation such as the Digital Services Package of the European Union do not fill this void, future legislation is needed that includes environmental and social standards for service provision in platform markets. Likewise, policies regarding data governance, artificial intelligence, e-commerce, digital finance, crypto-currencies among others should include legislation that advances sustainability goals.
