Green and digital transitions are putting environmental problems on the back burner, says study

The European Green Deal is a package of political initiatives to ensure that the EU reaches climate neutrality by 2050. Faced with this challenge, the parallel goals of the green and digital transitions are at the center of the European Commission’s priorities, but are they compatible with each other?

A study by the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) warns of the risk that grouping these two transformations together could lead to environmental challenges taking second place to digital innovation. The findings are published in the journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

The study suggests that the EU is using this dual or twin transition to obtain “a competitive advantage in the digital market such that environmental governance is put at the service of a very narrow aspect of sustainability: the sustainability of the new digital sector,” said Zora Kovacic, a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Faculty of Economics and Business and at the Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory (TURBA Lab) of the UOC’s Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), and first author of the research article on this issue.

Overlooking the most pressing environmental challenges

The research, which is based on an in-depth analysis of high-level EU policy documents, shows how grouping the green and digital transitions together “turns environmental problems into business opportunities to be exploited by digital technologies (such as AI, big data and blockchain), thereby creating new markets,” while putting environmental governance at the service of the digital sector, moving it “away from environmental issues and towards promoting the sustainability of the new digital sector,” said the authors in the article.

As explained by Kovacic, this is a clear case of “lamp-posting,” i.e. focusing on those problems that can be solved rather than on those that require urgent solutions.

“Important environmental challenges such as the loss of biodiversity, soil degradation, changes in geochemical cycles, and water depletion and pollution, to name but a few, are being neglected as a result of the dual transition because they are not digital challenges. Problems that can be solved with digital technologies, on the other hand, are being prioritized,” said the researcher.

An improbable coalition

In view of this, the researchers consider that promises of solutions that are both green and digital are an “improbable coalition,” as they are based on different logics.

“The green transition is driven by a logic of limits under which certain things ‘can’t be done.’ For example, we can’t pollute to the point of altering ecosystems. The digital transition, on the other hand, is driven by a logic of unlimited possibilities, in which any problem can be solved provided there is enough human ingenuity. These two logics—’this can’t be done’ and ‘this can be done’—are unlikely to work together and may even be contradictory,” said Kovacic.

In fact, the UOC-led research article shows how the tension between the two transitions is acknowledged by the European Commission itself in documents such as the 2022 Strategic Foresight Report or the warning of the Joint Research Center (JRC), a European Commission Directorate-General in charge of providing scientific and technical advice, which points out that the digital and green transitions “can reinforce each other but can also clash.”

According to the research team, the twin transition is thus a discursive resource used by the European Commission to create synergies and consensus around political issues that are difficult to govern and are often controversial.

“As a result, policy is no longer constructed as evidence-based but as based on the desire to provide solutions,” said Kovacic.

A way to fund local projects

The study also analyzed the National Recovery and Resilience Plans funded by the NextGenerationEU scheme. The results show that EU funding focuses on plans previously established by Member States.

“Countries seem to use the twin transition label strategically […] as a means to fund specific local projects, either by coupling green measures with local needs (for example, energy efficiency coupled with post-earthquake reconstruction) or by presenting local projects as part of the green transition (for example, the extension of metro and train lines),” said the authors.

Despite this funding strategy, rather than a case of greenwashing, the researchers consider that “the twin transition discourse is based on simplified win-win ideas, supported by digital imaginary, which fail to deliver their promised solutions,” they said.

A more participatory and inclusive alternative path

The research team proposes an alternative policy path to address this: “avoid technocratic solutions, which inevitably entail trade-offs, and rather focus on democratic resolutions, as a means of dealing with trade-offs, in a participatory and inclusive way, as a means of dealing with trade-offs, in a participatory and inclusive way.” They cite as examples actions such as the recognition of Mar Menor as a legal person.

“It was a bottom-up initiative, driven by activists and academics, and is a great example of a participatory process that led to a very comprehensive understanding of inclusive policy: the inclusion of nature itself—the Mar Menor lagoon—in the fight for environmental conservation,” said the researcher.

Kovacic has been assisted in this scientific paper by TURBA Lab researchers Cristina García Casañas, Lucía Argüelles and Paloma Yáñez Serrano, Professor Ramon Ribera and Professor Hug March, and Louisa Prause of Stellenbosch University (South Africa).