Johanna Pohl
Researcher at the interface of sustainability and digitalisation at the Zurich Knowledge Center for Sustainable Development (ZKSD)
Johanna Pohl conducts research at the interface of sustainability and digitalisation. As a trained environmental engineer, she is particularly interested in how the environmental impact of ICT-based services can be determined. Johanna was a member of the junior research group “Digitalization and Sustainability” at the Technische Universität Berlin and is currently a fellow at the Zurich Knowledge Center for Sustainable Development (ZKSD).
Redirecting digital technologies for the deep sustainability transformation
Governments worldwide hope that digitalisation can provide key solutions for the pressing social and environmental crises. Yet digitalisation, in its current and mainstream form, is rather aggravating than solving many of the problems at hand. What is needed instead is a deep sustainability transformation that fundamentally reorganizes the economy and all its sectors – agriculture, mobility, energy, mobility, consumption, industry, and buildings. Johanna’s talk will show how digitalisation can support the quest for such a deep sustainability transformation and how the governance of digital technologies can be reshaped to contribute to ambitious goals for social and environmental sustainability. The talk is based on the report "Digital Reset", published last year and the result of the project "Digitalization for Sustainability - Science in Dialogue" (D4S), a two-year scientific dialogue among 15 European experts.