This grant proposes to fund a workshop in Washington, D.C. in Fall 2003 on the relationships between information technology and the environment. The workshop will be convened by the Center for Industrial Ecology at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in association with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the International Society for Industrial Ecology and will deliberately build on a recent special issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology (JIE), AE-commerce, The Internet and the Environment.
Information technology has been heralded as source of autonomous environmental improvement and decried as an energy hog that will force society to Adig more coal. Emerging research is beginning to move expert understanding beyond opposing assertions. That research is not widely known and it poses new challenges and research needs. Using the research from the special issue as a nucleus, the workshop will examine and update current knowledge of topics such as the environmental implications of Adematerialization" through increased use of electronic services; telecommuting; e-commerce's impact on retailing; opportunities for catalyzing green markets via the Internet and software agents; opportunities for improved product management and recovery through product tagging; and better environmental intelligence from distributed information systems using emerging wireless technologies. The workshop will provide a means of continuing and updating the work catalyzed by the special issue of the JIE. More broadly, the workshop will assess and extend the emerging understanding of IT and the environment. It will also bring together the researchers and key funding agencies to discuss and develop a set of targeted research priorities. Presentations will be videotaped and used to prepare an on-line learning module. The special issue of the JIE will be made available on-line. A short paper on research priorities will be produced based on the workshop.
