Carbon Accounting in the Digital Industry: The Need to Move towards Decision Making in Uncertainty

Gabrielle Samuel (), Federica Lucivero, Bran Knowles and Katherine Wright
Additional contact information
Gabrielle Samuel: Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2B 4BG, UK
Federica Lucivero: Ethox Centre, Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, Old Road Campus, Oxford OX3 7LF, UK
Bran Knowles: School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4WA, UK
Katherine Wright: School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4WA, UK

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 5, 1-15

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 following 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 these calls for more data 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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/5/2017/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/5/2017/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:16:y:2024:i:5:p:2017-:d:1348694

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().