** Deadline extended to 10th March 2023 **
Call for Paper for RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2023
Digitalisation and Sustainability in Climate Changed Geographies: Production, Investment, and Connectivities
Session organisers:
Felicia Liu (University of York)
Karen Lai (Durham University)
Digitalisation is emerging as the solution to contemporary sustainability challenges. According to its proponents, synergistic opportunities to deploy digital technology to facilitate the transition to a greener, more sustainable future abounds. This ranges from using artificial intelligence to maximise production and operational efficiency (Mehmood et al. 2019), deploying the Internet of Things to monitor complex supply chains (e.g. Ben-Daya et al. 2019), shifting corporate governance to digital platforms to enhance transparency (Fenwick et al. 2019), to expanding blockchain applications to sustainable finance investments (Nassiry 2019), to packaging tech companies as an avenue of legitimate ‘green’ investment (NASDAQ 2022). Notwithstanding swathes of enthusiasm from industry and policymakers alike, this rapid convergence of digitalisation and sustainability is not without controversy. Alarmingly, blockchain mining and cloud storage are highly carbon-intensive (Foteinis 2018). The so-called ‘decentralised’ nature of fintech and digital solutions also poses unprecedented regulatory and governance challenges.
The implications of this bourgeoning field of deploying digitalisation to achieve sustainability goals require critical, systematic interrogation. Building upon existing geographical inquiries on fintech disruption on global production and financial networks (Lai and Samers 2021), infrastructural climate resilience (Pelling et al. 2022), environmental governance and reporting (Liu, Tang and Demeritt 2019), and the uneven distribution of environmental and economic benefits and burden by sustainable financing (Bigger and Millington 2020; Christophers 2018), geographers are well-situated theoretically and methodologically to explore the complex and under-researched interface of digitalisation and sustainability.
This session seeks to bring together these currently siloed scholarship and explore new insights into the crossroads of digitalisation and sustainability.
We welcome submissions on topics including, but not limited to:
– Evolving geographies of digitalisation and sustainability
– Environmental implication of digitalisation on supply chains, global production networks, and global financial networks
– Distributed ledger technologies (blockchains, cryptocurrencies) and sustainability concerns
– Implications of digitalisation on the built environment
– Impacts of digitalisation on regulation of environmental standards and reporting
If interested in joining the session, please send a short (up to 250 words) abstract along with your name, email address, and affiliation by 10th March 2023 to felicia.liu@york.ac.uk.
For information and registration about the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2023 (29 August to 1 September), please visit: https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference/
References
Ben-Daya, M., Hassini, E., & Bahroun, Z. (2019). Internet of things and supply chain management: a literature review. International Journal of Production Research, 57(15-16), 4719-4742.
Bigger, P., & Millington, N. (2020). Getting soaked? Climate crisis, adaptation finance, and racialized austerity. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 3(3), 601-623.
Christophers, B. (2018). Risk capital: Urban political ecology and entanglements of financial and environmental risk in Washington, DC. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(1-2), 144-164.
Fenwick, M., McCahery, J. A., & Vermeulen, E. P. (2019). The end of ‘corporate’governance: Hello ‘platform’governance. European Business Organization Law Review, 20, 171-199.
Foteinis, S. (2018). Bitcoin’s alarming carbon footprint. Nature, 554(7690), 169-170.
Lai, K. P. Y., & Samers, M. (2021). Towards an economic geography of FinTech. Progress in Human Geography, 45(4), 720-739.
Liu, F. H. M., Demeritt, D., & Tang, S. (2019). Accounting for sustainability in Asia: Stock market regulation and reporting in Hong Kong and Singapore. Economic Geography, 95(4), 362-384.
Mehmood, M. U., Chun, D., Han, H., Jeon, G., & Chen, K. (2019). A review of the applications of artificial intelligence and big data to buildings for energy-efficiency and a comfortable indoor living environment. Energy and Buildings, 202, 109383.
NASDAQ. (2022). ESG Funds Heavily Exposed to Tech Stocks. Available at: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/esg-funds-heavily-exposed-to-tech-stocks
Nassiry, D. (2019). The role of fintech in unlocking green finance. In Handbook of Green Finance (pp. 315-336). Springer, Singapore
Pelling, M., Chow, W. T., Chu, E., Dawson, R., Dodman, D., Fraser, A., … & Ziervogel, G. (2022). A climate resilience research renewal agenda: learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for urban climate resilience. Climate and Development, 14(7), 617-624.
Karen P.Y. Lai 