A Tale of Two Cities: Reflections on Digital Technology and the Natural Environment

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.