which only 20% is recycled. This means that valuable resources are too rarely recovered. Landfill sites are spilling over and increasing volumes of hazardous chemicals are released into the environment. To meet the high demand for hardware, extraction of rare earth elements and other precious metals like cobalt and lithium is increasing steadily, in turn leading to immense destruction and violence. Computing centres and servers, too, consume immense amounts of energy and often have inefficient cooling systems, meaning they, too, have a major CO2 footprint.
In other words, despite all this exciting innovation, accelerating sustainability through digital transformation will not happen without deliberate decisions and actions. Fridays for Future has harnessed the benefits of digital transformation for its own purposes. Everyone has a smartphone and can use it to join a group within a messenger app. This allows more and more young people around the world to connect with their peers to create change together. They l earn things they didn’t even know they didn’t know, and things that they may not have wanted to know. They connect with people from very different backgrounds, which creates genuine friction. That, said Katharina, is one of the major challenges of digital transformation for the movement: to create a shared culture so everyone can collectively learn and grow inside a highly diverse community.
Today, knowledge is power – and so it is crucial to maintain control over our personal data and to not hand it over to a third entity. It is also vital to combat inequality when it comes to access to information. Activists can use information specifically to achieve a major objective of global significance. The easy availability of digital tools has made it possible to mobilise people around the world, contribute actively to a cause, share information, create websites and apps of their own, and work together on a common cause no matter where in the world they are. It’s important to ensure we are not led astray in the world of digital transformation, but that we navigate it intelligently to overcome challenges and remain close to nature: for the benefit of humankind and the planet. This requires us to create systems in a such a way that it becomes ever more difficult to harm people and the environment. Katharina Maier and Sabrina Apitz on BigBlueButton (screenshot: IJAB)
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