 Welcome ladies and gentlemen at home and also a very warm welcome to the few people here right at our venue and I would like to welcome you to our presentation series making sense of the Digital Society which we have run for three years now. We're listening to great speakers and of course we talk to them we that is the Alexander von Humburg Institute for Society and Internet and the Federal Agency for Civic Education a joint venture uniting great academic expertise and great awareness in order to communicate digital topics that have great concern to all of us I would like to thank the Alexander von Humburg Institute Christian Katzenbach and the Federal Agency for Civic Education the hosting organization with Christian Grau Fogel I would like to thank you for having me here so it sounds a bit like we are men only but I'm talking about the operational level only and the bosses they are all women and if I'm not mistaken we have 50% women and 50% men speaking here at our lecture series and you can have a look at our YouTube channel where you can listen to all of the other presentations we speak German because our guest is from Germany but we'll have two interpreters here at our venue and later on you will be able to listen to the English translation listening to the recording and I would also like to thank the interpreters and after the presentation making digitalization work for the climate the two of us will be here at the stage and then we will discuss your question you can use our participation tool slider.com and if you look at our stream you can see this tool and you can ask your question and they can be downloaded or up voted and we'll have a spokesperson here that will read out your question so that we can have a discussion with you so you can enter your question into your mobile device and we are warming up the router with our streaming and then maybe our guest can tell us how many terabyte hours were needed in order to produce and use iPhones or other smartphones and the share of emissions of our devices has increased from 2.5% to 4% between 2013 and 2020 even though the devices themselves have become much more efficient in Germany 8% of our energy consumption is used up by the production and use of these devices worldwide it's 10% so even though technology is becoming ever more efficient and there's less CO2 emissions well we will overcompensate this saving potential because we will we have the internet of things or industrial internet of things so this is not only about fridges ordering white wine or by themselves but this is about the total digitalization of the manufacturing industry so this is a kind of celebrity death match between the environment and growth is it really possible to have green growth maybe we need negative growth maybe digitalization can really help us maybe we need more people to participate and to get involved in order to actually achieve the goal that ICT will help us reduce CO2 emissions by 20% by 2030 especially when it comes to mobility and logistics but these are just a few questions and topics that we would like to deal with when looking at our guest our guest wrote a book with Stefan Lange and two years ago smart green world making digitalization work for sustainability our guest is professor for social ecological transformation and sustainable digitalization at the technical University of Berlin and at the Einstein Center Digital Future he's a professor and researcher on climate policy trade policy sustainable and economics global justice and digital transformation and since 2016 he has been the head of the research group digitalization and social ecological transformation at the technical University of Berlin and at the Institute for ecological and economic research and I'm really looking forward to the presentation of Tillman's Ontario's the floor is yours thank you very much to be Muller for the friendly introduction well distinguished audience it is really great to stand in front of this audience but I would also like to welcome those who have joined us online and who are those who have to stay at home and our topic is making digitalization work for the climate this is actually the title of our book smart green world making digitalization work for sustainability today I would like to focus on climate policy and there are five principles that I would like to present to you because I only have 25 minutes and I hope that we will have a discussion later on so my first idea is digitalization and climate climate policy and digital policy they are actually separated on two different planets because climate policy is top on the agenda again that is thanks to Fridays for future so it is the subject of a political debate after the crisis or between our lockdowns there are more and more demonstrations but there are also a lot of governments in the world that unfortunately well they do only little but now they seem to put more emphasis on these topics last year the Germany decided to phase out of coal and there are also other countries well lagging behind like Japan but even these countries they try to focus on zero emissions they want to have zero emissions by 2050 the United States however well they won't achieve they haven't achieved this goal yet and the Green Deal is also one of the main priorities of the EU but when we talk about climate protection it's mostly about less less emissions and less energy consumption in order to be able to have this transformation towards 100% renewable energies less consumption less transport and less movement of goods but when it comes to the digital policy well it's different because digitalization is mentioned in the Green Deal but rather to strike the balance between the environment and the economy and in order to be a driver of growth in Germany the idea is to have an value-addled of 125 million and the industrial Internet of Things that is supported by Germany and this idea that Germany is a world leader in export and this should be promoted and within the European Union artificial intelligence is considered to be the main growth a driver and in Brussels and other countries the idea is to really promote AI in order to foster growth but in order to catch up with China and the United States because they have made even more progress and so I think it's quite clear that digital policy is always focusing on economic growth which is very different from the objectives set by our climate policy so my first idea is that we should unite these two ideas Germany of course is an exception in the past two or three years there was a lot of debate going on about digitalization and sustainability and the Ministry of the Environment well has really made great efforts but if you look into other countries or great companies then digitalization and climate protection strategies seems to be two different things and people do not really focus on the risks of these two spheres so it's a bit schizophrenic because we have digitalization on the one hand and climate on the other hand both of course are on top of the agenda but both have different objectives so we will not be able to control climate change if we go on business as usual but this is what digitalization is supposed to do just to be a driver of conquering new markets manipulating consumers and also as a kind of lubricant for financial transactions so the first thesis is digital policy and climate policy can be found on two different planets but what about opportunities and risks they're just a few highlights that I would like to mention if digitalization and climate policy is considered to be part of the same thing then it's usually efficiency that is focused on because people think that due to digitalization everything's getting more virtual this helps us save resources and if you focus on the climate then people think that digitalization helps to make many processes more efficient which of course will help to reduce CO2 emissions but this is the assumption and it's a debate that has been going on for 25 years in the beginning of the year 2000 there was some analysis and they tried to find out whether it's better to have a newspaper subscription online than really having a physical newspaper and a few years later there was the debate whether it's better to have an mp3 download instead of buying a CD and then there were more debates about video streaming there were different studies and ideas but usually people think well if you go to your video store taking your car well and you will need 33% more energy than just looking at a streamed video so there are a lot of examples there are smart heating systems for example there are some empirical studies showing that you can save about 33% of energy by optimizing heating control but of course these are rather theoretical ways of saving energy but I'm a sociologist so what I would like to know is go beyond these technical innovations in order to find out how the actual consumption the use has been changing for example introducing online news or digital music and video and so what does this mean when it comes to energy and CO2 emissions and I think it's quite clear that there are a lot of different effects that actually offset these potentials of saving energy because well printed media well feels like environmental pollution but on the other hand there are tweets and blogs and of course they all need to be generated there's a lot of data traffic and you need a lot of electricity when it comes to music it's not about downloading mp3s but actually it is streamed and sometimes well it will stream at several times if it's your favorite song and even those who download their Spotify libraries well they will have a much bigger music library on their smartphone or their tablet than in the past streaming of course when it comes to audience ratings well they are they've remained the same and then you have to add streaming on to it and then there's the last example smartphone systems because we had a study going on about resource protection potential so we looked into 500 households in Germany and we found out that on average well the average smartphone system I consist of 10 different devices so you have the heating control system and you have a lot of other devices, sensors for humidity, home security cameras, smoke detectors and all these devices of course they also consume a lot of electricity and will cause CO2 emissions and so the bottom line is rebound effects, induction effects, growth effects well have changed our consumption and our behavior which means they have offset this saving potential so this is like a zero sum game when it comes to climate protection. My third thesis how could it be better that's also something you can learn from corona in some way because during the corona crisis we saw that when digitalization is systematically substituted then emissions can be considerably reduced I'm not saying that's the blueprint as to how it's supposed to go but it is a teaching you can see how it should be shaped because we saw that during the peak in the corona crisis in April we had 26 percent less emissions especially through reduced traffic for 2020 globally speaking we are expecting four to seven percent less emissions in Germany we're talking about thirty to a hundred million tons that's about what Germany should do every year to do its fair share in climate policy issues and this crisis was very important here we had 50 to 80 percent less traffic but a hundred twenty percent more video conferences and video conferences of course also need electricity but net there's a net reduction because you have much less than when driving a car or commuting by car or by airplane and digitization has also showed here that when using digitization we can drastically reduce emissions without having to build on artificial intelligence the internet of the things or anything but just using the existing potential in terms of infrastructure and terminal devices so what we should do would be to reduce the digital divide because during the crisis during lockdown of course those families or employees who had less access to digital devices and the internet of course were at a disadvantage but as a country I can say that this was sufficient we didn't see the net the internet being overloaded or anything just because we had more video conferences but with the existing potential emissions could be drastically reduced and the challenge now will be to continue with this not the corona crisis of course but this substitution how can we as a society see to it that digitization can substitute analog fossil material intensive matters rather than just having it on top as an addition I think it's quite clear that the new normal after the crisis when at some point time there will be a time after the crisis then it'll not be more digital it could well it will be more digital but it could be an add-on and people could still be traveling taking aeroplanes commuting plus also having a particularly you know a lot of more video conferences and so on and my last thesis after the third one substitution now we have the fourth one digitization especially has a large potential but also some risks in terms of transforming the sectors for example energy transition decentralizing energy with a hundred percent renewables that will be more digital of course I don't want to go into this then a change in terms of mobility away from the car more car sharing public transport and so on so mobility we will also have service platforms that will be one central element again based on digitization so I want to talk more about a transition in consumption patterns because it also fits into the topic of growth which I touched upon with my first thesis now digitization even and the over the past years has already provided us with quite a few tools for more sustainable consumption so what do we mean by consuming more sustainably the two components first of all more sustainable production products which have been produced more socially sustainable manner and also consuming less because in Germany at least in these highly industrialized countries we have too much consumption not good for the climate and so now we would talk about sufficiency in consumption and digitization can do a lot towards this we saw that in the past with ebay that's an older story and platforms sharing platforms platforms for second things having easy access to building plans to repairs and so on but there the problem is or was still is that this may still be a niche because it's in you need intrinsically motivated consumers willing to do that who watches do it yourself videos on YouTube some people do but usually completely different videos are streamed which would rather incentivize towards consuming more and so we have we need to have more aware consumers we don't have enough of them usually and then also a large share of consumption is done on the basis of habits so you have a point of sale you have ad hoc purchases spontaneously and there you have these offers for sharing that which will only have a limited effect they're just not perceived and I'd like to tell you now that we're starting on a new research project I'm giving you a little secret here it started two weeks ago and it's not about low-tech but high-tech we're using artificial intelligence but we want to promote sustainable consumerism so nudging that's what it's about so we want to have the free choice for the consumers but we want to give them information and somehow twitch the infrastructure a little bit for decision-making so that it's easier to make more sustainable decisions in consuming or consuming more ecological products so we will set up a green consumption assistant which will be a tool helping people to choose more sustainable products or find the alternatives to purchasing there we are cooperating with nicocia and at the technical university my team we also have in a professor also with a professor from Boyd University who specializes in artificial intelligence and we are developing a green shopping assistant which will help provide consumers with sustainability information so it's not like idealo comparison of prices or just taking the first things which pop up in the advertisement but also search under social and ecological criteria that can happen through pop-ups through consultancy information advice anyway in the smartphone app it could also work differently and what do we want to do we want to hand out information so that people know where to find more alternative products or alternatives to purchasing and we also want to have transparency in the label jungle we have 80 different animal welfare labels you know nobody really knows what is really sustainable or what is just greenwashing and something which is also important at the point of sale where people make decisions we want immediately to give them an alternative with the link where for example they have the most energy-saving fridge or fairly produced t-shirt or other alternatives so what are we going to do we are going to build up a large sustainability sustainable product database and then we will have criteria under which sustainable options can be assessed and then you want to have not just more sustainable products but also alternatives like repair sharing workshops whatever and then we want to develop the tool on the platform and we also want to have social sciences research combined with this because all this can be very energy intensive we don't know exactly how energy intensive it will be but what we do know from imaging processes or image analysis processes that artificial intelligence which can just differentiate between a squirrel and another feline will have to see thousands of pictures and reiteration all the time to be able to learn to how to differentiate and somebody in Massachusetts then has calculated that would be 248 megatons to 284 tons of carbon dioxide being emitted that is horrendous so we will always have to monitor to see how energy intensive our green shopping assistant it is and how to avoid going falling into the trap so that we can contribute towards the climate so we want to transition in consumer patterns but we don't want to just use the AI hype towards growth but we would rather want to contribute towards less consumer consumption and we should learn how to consume less and still be happy and that is also a social matter so my fifth thesis that is also a bit my conclusion is that I believe that to make a breakthrough here we need a very strong political world politics will have to shape the process firstly digitization climate protection environmental protection all that has to be one thing we need policy coherency here rather than being schizophrenic and saying here we want growth and there we want sustainability but we also have to be very consistent here not only in Germany but also in Europe so the EU council I hope will also show up certain possibilities as to how to use and shape digitization towards sustainable achievements for example that you have more labelling for the computer centers data centers and the devices have a longer period of life with guarantees or the right to repair warranties longer lasting or the fact that software updates have to be provided right to the end of the lifecycle of the product and so on and so forth so we hope for political shaping of this process not only in Germany but also at an EU level and I hope that we've also been able to make a contribution here in an opinion we gave to the European parliament about how digitization globalization can go together this will be published in three weeks time in Brussels and then we don't want to have these rebound effects and therefore we need digital sufficiency as little digitization as necessary as little as as much as necessary and as little as possible and then I talked about substitution of digitization with the example of the teachings from the corona crisis and I would say okay we need a right for working from the home office but on the other hand also more drastic measures to make traffic less attractive and transport so that digitization can substitute traffic streams and digitization is also if you want to make it make digitization work for the climate we will have to support it we have to support projects and products research projects which don't necessarily derive from the industrial sector but if we want to have in this digitization and high tech then we will need public finances here and we hope to contribute to this but we will also need more public tenders which also see to it that sustainability is taken into account also promoting such projects mobility as a service platforms data banks for databases for traffic and so on and there's a lot of room for improvement yes thank you for listening and I will be very happy to have a very intriguing discussion thank you thank you very much there were a lot of interesting ideas and we could discuss forever we just have 20 minutes for discussion but I would like to point out that we have the slider dot come tool so please ask questions and we'll try to answer them to man Santalius will answer this question because I won't be able to do that well we'll see and before discussing well consumption political shaping technology I would like to get back to your presentation you said that there is that there will be a green consumption system and sounds very promising so it seems to tie in very nicely in this idea of green growth so what is this tool supposed to do in order to prevent these rebound effects because we don't want to consume more even if it's green consumption because this is not the objective of the goal the tool wants us to do something different so what do you do in order to prevent these rebound effects this term green consumption well this is of course a bit strange term because this is not about increasing green consumption you don't want people to consume more this is what I try to explain here this is not only about consuming more products even if they are fairly produced but we don't want people to consume that much well what is important about the design of the tool it must be really sustainable well if you develop this database collecting information on consumption decisions that are really sustainable but then there are others that we should not recommend because it's rather green washing and it's not only about products it's also about companies so which are the companies that are to be recommended and then there are other companies that have really high emissions as legates well we of course we have to find a compromise here because we really want a model based on strong sustainability and we would like to recommend products and sharing options that are genuinely sustainable and I think this is what matters most we have a combination we have a AI professor and I have great expertise on sufficiency and sustainable consumption and Ecosia Ecosia is a partner that is not focusing on profit but on purpose it's quite small opposed to Google but they are 50 million search requests every day but Ecosia is not really interested in increasing their sales but they really want to develop a green consumption assistant even if this means that they have a lower turnover so first of all a strong focus on sustainability and the second thing is that we will do research a lot of research while this assistant is running so it's not only about AI and our reduction potential we really want to find out do consumers really use our tool how are they going to use this tool maybe they consumption will even increase because they think well it's a fairly produced t-shirt so I will buy three instead of one so we would really like to respond to potential rebound effects I think this is really an innovation because usually people think that we will just try to promote green products so this tool should also be able to learn it's based on AI and you used this term of nudging pointing out green products nudging the consumers it's very similar to the corona app this is a high-risk encounter don't buy this is this possible yeah I think so this I think this is possible because we work in a team and we focus on sufficiency oriented marketing together with avocado avocado store so together with other companies we would try to find out what will this message do saying don't buy this maybe this is helpful well be improving the image and at the same time reducing consumption this is really interesting quite an interesting issue there's another term that we've just heard and that is digital sufficiency in connection with a motto that I find in smart green world as much digitization as necessary and as little as possible well maybe you can go into detail here what are the sectors affected where do we need a lot of digital sufficiency well can you differentiate well here that's if you read this book smart green world well but I can tell you the details because there are a lot of international researchers that really tried to go into depth here we also will hand this as a journal first of all we have hardware sufficiency and what matters here most is it's really the operational life of the device that should be as long as possible and it should be possible to repair them secondly it's about software sufficiency because when it comes to software you really need to have this sufficiency element in mind for example if you look at your browsers there are a lot of different energy consumptions firefox safari or chrome chrome for example well it's consuming a lot of electricity don't use chrome not only for energy saving reasons but also for data protection reasons but in this case actually it's both you should really try to avoid google not only for reasons of data privacy but when it comes to software well there's quite a trivial case there are these loops on the netflix or google they want you to do some binge watching this is what they do when programming digital services but you really need to focus on sufficiency hardware sufficiency software sufficiency but on the one hand there is of course user sufficiency at an individual level and again you should really ask yourself whether you need a new smartphone every year and new services but the question is how can you use digitization in order to be as sufficient as possible in your life well it starts with food but there's also mobility for example then there is economic sufficiency and this ties in nicely with my last thesis we as a society should use digitization in order to well achieve a decentralized degrowth economy so this digitization should not be used in order to have a transnational economy with a lot of movement of goods and trying to optimize our output what we should do is have decentralized production in a democratic way and really changing our system so i'm not as naive as Jeremy Rifkin well there will be no implosion of capitalism but i think there is a potential so this is what economic sufficiency should do you often talk about incremental about soft digitization so it seems that we can optimize our behavior but maybe there will be some disruptive moments i would like to read this out to you because you're one of the few scientists academics that really try to look into the future and you have an idea about the year 2030 and you said one ways of preventing a rebound effect that more efficient technology will lead to more consumption is the imperative of inaction an advertising ban a ban on manipulation but well i think this would mean that the social that the business model for social media would actually be obsolete well this business model of social media yes that's true but not the business model of social media themselves the idea is that people can exchange information and of course you can uphold this model and you can have a different model that you use for their different pay options because you don't when it comes to facebook for example you have millions of advertising revenue but you don't have to manipulate manipulate the users in order to do so because the current business model of social media really tries to manipulate consumers by optimizing their ads in a very subtle way this will become obsolete if we focus on sustainability in the future and this is really this imperative of inaction but it's not only this ban on manipulation or advertising then it also has AI in mind because even if we have this green consumption assistant that takes consumption or purchase decisions for us well this should be transparent because we don't want to take these decisions making away from our citizens you really need to be transparent and this imperative of an action should really prevent companies from manipulating consumers so as soon as you provide information you should be transparent so people can decide in favor against it you also mentioned Germany is an important economic location there's for example the guy acts a european project where we try to build infrastructure but there are also very specific examples best practice you mentioned streaming what i'm thinking of is mp3 in nürnberg and erlang at the fraunhofer institute for integrated circuits there is a case of 1.3 billion bits and it was reduced by 12 times with which is a lot of data reduction this worked quite well there was a lot of good research done by Dieter Weitzer but it took about 10 years in order to achieve this do you think this is also possible when it comes to other media video for example because you were referring to streaming and downloading so maybe we should not use high resolution do you think it's better to download a film well when it comes to technological possibilities well i can't really tell you because i'm a sociologist so i won't come up with such a revolutionary innovation like mp3 but when it comes to data well reduction sufficiency should not be understood as lower life quality and i don't like mp3 i don't like sound quality but if i use my smartphone it's fine because sound quality is quite poor anyway so i'm not against mp3 but i don't think it's the solution because i'm a musician and i didn't like this i need good sound quality i wouldn't use mp3 at home but it's fine if you have your devices and this the same applies to streaming let's say you have a really big screen and this is a high definition film it's fine but if you watch a film using your smartphone you don't need high resolution with a lot of data transfer and this is what we should do so you should at least have a default option adjusting streaming resolution to your end device it would be even better to have a default option always opting for low resolution so this might be a low-tech solution and maybe you can even do more so this was a technical question now you said that say i also sometimes has an energy problem and it might be even worse now because we're talking about neural networks controlling each other and that is very energy intensive and these networks have to learn and that also costs a lot of energy if you have them self-learning so what are these solutions do we really need everywhere where we need it is is that a possibility or is the hope let's say to have these kind of springboard innovations we have a federal agency promoting this for example analog computers which can be much faster and would use much less energy there we had a software entrepreneur from the open source movement raffae laguna doing that what do you think about it well springboard innovation i can imagine that but as i said i'm the wrong person but i think there's a risk that springboard innovation could lead to the fact that in many cases there'll be more ai being used where otherwise you would not have used it just because it's so cheaper easier probably faster as well and then we have these rebound effects which are prebound effects really you can expect them to happen anyway and the same by the way with 5g i mean 5g okay you can of course use only a ten thousands part of the energy for data transfer but it won't lead to using this energy but to more data being transferred so only if this is being controlled and you also have planks and guidelines so to speak only then can you really have energy savings and so i think your first point was also very probable yes so we look first to see where the true potential for ai lies this is a has been a buzz word for some time now but you write ai on to all sorts of boxes without thinking about whether or not it should have ai in it in the first place but and we're only going to use it selectively though if we look at the product database we can do it with traditional methods we don't even need ai so even if we have an ai protected tool under our developing this we will only have ai in it selectively so i have no idea how to regulate this or incentivize this at the political level i doubt that that higher electricity taxes energy taxes would help for example with streaming but whether that would be applicable to the development of ai instruments and algorithms i wouldn't know that's also highly intriguing so how can ai one day be regulated what kind of a framework could there be and sufficiency saying again as little ai as necessary as possible as much as necessary and you said okay you talked about negative growth and sufficiency which could go together we haven't arrived there yet but so far at the moment we do have negative growth so i think it'll be difficult to explain to the population that this is something we want to see in the future well the difference is that we have this is now a disaster bound negative growth whereas degrowth is a very clear path it's been shaped and it's an objective yeah but i'm meant to say something else because you also briefly mentioned quality of life you said if we work with digital sufficiency and then we have a future vector whereby it's shaped then we would gain in life quality we would make gains what do you mean by that what would it mean and how do you define quality of life well i'll give you another example in my research i also deal with social acceleration so acceleration of the pace of life and over the past two years i've had a quite a comprehensive research project on acceleration and digitization and i think if this was combined with degrowth or digital sufficiency then we wouldn't have the effect that we use the advantages of digitization but at the same time we also accelerate our pace of life but no we could use these promises of technology i mean these predate digitization that you say okay the machines will do things for us and we will have more time for the nice things i mean that was the promise of industrialization you thought if we had the first fresh machine for the farmers then you said okay you will have more time now and but that has always meant that time gained by technological progress has then led to acceleration as well and i've seen that there's a clear combination and connectivity connectedness in germany between the grade of digitization of a person or a population and the pace of life and this is really a vicious circle which has to be broken because you have more digitization leading to more transport more meetings more activities in the 24-hour period because then we will not be able to live the good life we are hoping for so binge watching wouldn't be part of this quality of life watching netflix so now let's see what's happening on slider what kind of questions have we had so we'd like to turn to the audience if you can see and hear us so morris tim from a e g yes thank you very much for this very interesting lecture and the very good moderation now we have seen many questions on the entrepreneurial entrepreneurial aspect aspect and the highest voted question was will sharing or sufficiency always find a majority shouldn't we rather have a strict monitoring of the environment of the companies this is all of intimate asking yeah good question i think it's good because it's not an either or i think we need environmental monitoring and sufficiency sufficiency alone will not suffice at well known thing in discussing sustainability the combination of sufficiency increase of efficiency and consistency so the circular economy that on its own it's still not enough but i mean the question is whether or not you'll find a majority in the public opinion and i think yes sufficiency very often at least here in germany is often misunderstood as not having something and i think that is just a problem we would have as soon as we leave academia and i'm not sure i would like to talk to a broad audience all the time about sufficiency but but certainly this gain in quality of life that is not people don't realize that that exists so i say okay i am using these digital tools but i also have more time for the things which are really important to me and i think that is something most people would subscribe to or a combination of saying okay i use sharing offers which are more easily accessible for example with this green some consumption assistance nowadays maybe it's difficult for many people even to have access to a sharing system but when that's made easier then i don't have the obligation anymore to talking about a car to deal with repairs parking purchasing a car insurance i can just use it and at the same time i still have time left over and probably also money to do other things so this combination of a gain in quality of life and transformation that is something which will find a positive echo because very often people think okay they have to miss out on something and that's not true shall we continue then we have some more questions here's a question from Christian Katzenbach here he asks digitization goes through all areas of life and so many social concepts have changed private sphere the sphere of work and so on is that true also for the concept of sustainability and then martin schmitt asks does it also mean that the concept of the environment changes through digitalization well cool these questions the last one is rather philosophical what is the environment especially when the environment is becoming more and more to a co-world by the use of digital tools like drone planted trees for reforestation and such things i think the concept of sustainability has not yet changed and um yes there were some attempts of talking to talk talking about sustainability 4.0 as if something had changed but i believe that is not the case you can't really substantiate this there's not really a new concept and i think that is the case because sustainability is something at the level of a goal and objective and this strange term of digitization i keep using it many people actually reject the term and they're quite right even but um this should only be a means for achieving an objective digitization itself is not an objective it's just a toolbox sustainability is it's about keeping to the planetary resilience boundaries or having more fairness so i think that these concepts do not collide very much but they can actually be very well combined and i do see this debate we've had over the past years about green it that was some time ago then we had ict for green and then we have the debate also in our work on digitization towards a socio ecological transition and not really a difference in the concept of sustainability thank you then a more historic question martin schwitt digitization did not begin 20 years ago is there an inter linkage between communication globalization and the environment between the 1980s and 90s for example offshoring of industrial project products please repeat the question now digitization didn't start 20 or 40 years ago that's true but what was the real question i'll read it out it's very high voted up very high and we're very democratic sometimes it's difficult to understand so digitization did not begin 20 years ago is the connection between digitization of communication globalization and the environment in the 1980s and 90s for example with offshoring of industrial products i suppose it's about parallel parallel to today with today and well offshoring industrial production i suppose the buzzword would be globalization so the transnationalization of production changed it chains and they of course very much rely on digitization and we would have to go back at least into the 80s maybe the 70s when the banks began to digitize their capital flows and then they had digital financial transport first but then also the management of these hundreds of you know fragmented production chains where one pair of genes is produced at seven or twelve different production sites with all sorts of supplies in between that was only made possible through digitization and it does mean that that has a very has had a strong impact on sustainability and the concept of sustainability because globalization has changed the debate on sustainability but this debate of course to be honest we've only seen it since 1987 or 92 at Rio when it was global but before that it was about the environment the whole debate and it did not very much focus on feedback loops with international fairness i mean that was the breakthrough at the rio summit that sustainability and development fairness and ecology the north and the south that all that was combined so if you now think once around the corner and say that digitization certainly shaped globalization and globalization was then changed the debate which was on the ecology and protecting nature and then turned it into a debate on sustainability and then i would subscribe to that yes and next topic we're talking about regulation we were talking about companies but now on the green consumption assistant now why is this approach this is what they means the assistant not thought at an entrepreneurial level maybe as a monet not as a monetary tool for consumers green is probably the largest marketing tool of very many industry sectors well i think this might be possible to develop this incorporation with companies at corporate level especially our sustainability database because there are also some companies that have joined us well we see how intense our cooperation is going to be but on the one hand we have this search engine and this mapping service and the idea is to provide alternative information to our consumers so you can really use this this these mechanisms powering our shop assistant or shopping assistant and of course this can be used to track companies and you can provide tools that will help companies to change well it's definitely possible the question is whether we will be able to do all this at the same time and maybe we should rather focus on other people and companies that are interested in cooperating with this and i would like to encourage them to try and cooperate with us well this shopping assistant has quite positive feedback and here it says it's a great idea but how can you identify the resources that are used by one product if you look at the whole value chain even Ecosia uses a Microsoft search engine and is funded by ads so what about the connection with the green shopping assistant well the first question is very easy to answer but it's quite difficult to implement actually because we have to use lifecycle analyses they are ready in place for a number of products and maybe we can add some information to this the footprint of a t-shirt for example well there are a lot of lca's so you don't need to reinvent them but but so lca is our best practice tool but it's not that easy because we have so many products and we need to combine all this data and we need to evaluate and assess them because it's really supposed to be sustainable we don't want to green wash any products and the second part of the question well the second part was referring to Ecosia Ecosia and Bing well it's not really ideal I don't know whether it's better if Ecosia was cooperating with Google so it's really up to you to decide this and to assess this I don't know well which company is better Microsoft or Google well I think there are a lot of critical points with both companies Ecosia decided very early on so at least this is my perspective they said all right we'll play your game so we will need advertising revenue generated by Bing or Yahoo but we will use this revenue in order to plant trees for our purpose so this is an important change in strategy and they said we want to be even more sustainable at the front end with the user who knows so I guess we'll also try to reach out to Google and Bing and talk to them and try and find out whether a green consumption assistant might be a good idea for their platform too and maybe we can help them to transform too but of course I don't want to get raise expectations too high so Cristiana said this was all very fast I think she was referring to your presentation but her question is what are the sustainability criteria that you use for software and hardware products and how do you assess commercial databases so the sustainability criteria for software what are the sustainability criteria that you use for your recommendations for your shopping assistant and how do you assess commercial databases well there's not one set of sustainability criteria because well when it comes to hardware we're talking about sustainability today which I tried to focus on climate it's not only about these co2 footprint but we would also like to consider toxic substances that are being used or the conditions under which they are being produced I'm not only talking about rare earth or toxic substances that are used but also toxic substances in the factories but we should be even more open when it comes to software it is more open when it comes to software because there's a lot of research that needs to be done there's the car school manifesto where there's some principles and there's a very interesting study one of the co-authors of the paper that we are developing Laurence Hilty from Zurich and together with others he did so on behalf of the federal ministry of the environment but well we still have some two-thing problems here so of course there are a lot of well there's a lot of work that remains to be done maybe we can hear another one more question I think there's one question that is particularly appropriate referring to climate change it's more personal question given disasters forecast on climate change how can you be so optimistic about it well that's the only thing that makes sense and that is fun there's no point in turning a blind eye to everything and ignoring the developments because the more you know the more you have to do because it's the same with property so once you learn more and more about climate change and man-made climate change well I really feel obliged to bring about change and it's always better to be optimistic about it and especially if you want to encourage others to join so I don't want to be a doomonger here but well we should be clear about 1.5 degrees well we won't achieve that it doesn't seem possible but it's really worth fighting for well I'm really sent off a great because there is a big difference whether it's 2.2 2.3 or 2.5 degrees of global warming so optimism makes sense we have to fight for every bit thank you very much very interesting and intriguing question and thanks for watching and I have a philosophical question first a linguistical question about terms in English and German that we use because there were two question referring to the environment I was not quite sure whether this was referring to environment because we talked about globalization of all spheres of life and now we're talking about the digitization of all spheres of life this seems to be what happens if you use a capitalistic term so we often talk about digitization or digitalization but usually what is more common is digital transformation and I think this is a process that is much easier to shape because digitalization sounds like an agent that is really present in all spheres of life and then you get feel like you can't really act on that maybe these terms are not really helpful well I definitely agree and well the connotation of English and German terms are different sometimes I think there is a big difference between digitalization and digitalization because digitalization is a technical term digitalization however is a process of social change so this is really the change in our society well maybe not due to but in the context of the use of digital tools and algorithms digital transformation however is a term I would not like to use because I think transformation is a term that I would like to use for sustainability so digital as an adjective to transformation is not the the right thing to do we need an environmental transformation and the social transformation and maybe it's a digital transformation in some places for example one comes to digital sufficiency but transformation should be a separate term the political question actually refers to our sovereignty sovereignty in Germany and Europe and our role within this transformation this is what you're mentioning in your book you said in Germany we have the government the public sector is a big client a big customer when it comes information technology it's 25% so this is much more in many other western countries so the government the state is a big player that could really help shaping this transformation do you think this might be a locational advantage of Germany Germany being a big player or don't you think this is important yes I think it's definitely a competitive advantage because there are a lot of digital companies well I don't think this happens in China but many of these companies they really try to focus on environmental protection but then there are other dimensions of sustainability that are being ignored well CO2 has the objective of being carbon neutral but they do so by the revenues that they generate from surveillance and the monopolization of markets so in this case well environmental and social aspects well they are quite a chaos here so I don't think this really is a competitive advantage because in the United States there are some companies that really try to focus on sustainability and they have come a long way and they might have a stronger commitment to climate protection than states in Europe so maybe there's no point in just focusing on European policies but I might be I would be happy to see a debate at a European level and the link between decarbonization and digitalization and then maybe we can really use these as a competitive advantage here in Europe so the question as to whether the whether digitalization should be sacrificed to this idea of growth well we haven't answered this question yet we will of course continue this series on the 23rd or 24th of November so it's the 23rd of November with Lisa Denchig and we will continue on Monday thank you very much Tillman Santarios this was really a great what a great presentation very intriguing and thanks for joining us today it was really great and of course I will stay here a few more minutes and I'm happy to answer your questions also online questions and I'm always happy to see people that want to cooperate or join us thank you