Information Communication Technology (ICT) for Combating the Climate Crisis

Dear Colleagues,

Over recent years, it has become widely accepted that our humanity has entered the “Anthropocene epoch”, during which humankind has had a significant impact on Earth and its ecosystems. One manifestation of this impact has been global climate change, the defining crisis of our time, and it is happening even more quickly than we feared. However, we are far from powerless in the face of these global threats. As Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out in September 2019, “the climate emergency is a race we are losing, but it is a race we can win”. No corner of our Earth is immune to the devastating consequences of climate change. Rising temperatures are fueling environmental degradation, natural disasters, weather extremes, food and water insecurity, economic disruption and conflict. Sea levels are rising, the Arctic is melting, coral reefs are dying, oceans are acidifying and forests are burning. It is clear that business as usual is not good enough. As the infinite cost of the climate crisis reaches irreversible highs, now is the time for bold collective action.

At the same time, information and communication technology (ICTs) is being rapidly deployed around the world. ICT can reduce energy use, cut greenhouse gas emissions and build resilience to combat the climate crisis. According to a recent report, SMARTer2030: ICT Solutions for 21st Century Challenges, ICT can slash global greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2030, thus, holding them at 2015 levels, while generating over USD 11 trillion in economic benefits and connecting an additional 2.5 billion people to the knowledge economy by 2030.

Therefore, this workshop aims to bring together leading researchers to innovate and advance ICT for combating the climate crisis, also focusing on government and industry representatives, including policy and decision makers, with an interest in adopting ICT for the addressal of the climate crisis, and, finally, ICT practitioners working on ICT solutions and developers of sustainable ICT systems or applications for combating the climate crisis.

Topics include (but are not limited to) the following examples, which all ought to discuss ICT4C3-related research and its implications to humanity:

• Assessing ICT’s holistic impact on diverse ecosystems;
• Green and sustainable wireless and mobile technologies for the climate crisis;
• ICT-driven technical, economic and social responses to the climate crisis;
• The climate crisis and health and wellbeing, e.g., ICT-driven traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for physical and mental health;
• ICT-driven solutions for solving global warming;
• The climate crisis and resources, e.g., AI-enabled renewable energy harvesting;
• ICT-driven measurements, modelling and predictions, such as big data analytics, and AI for supporting the detection, forecasting and communication of natural hazards, detecting natural disasters with remote sensing;
• Power line communications and computation-based intelligent networks and systems for the climate crisis (e.g., disaster response and environment monitoring and sensing, hospital (including clinics) and/or other medical and healthcare applications;
• Visible light communications and computation (deeply integrated with PLC)-based intelligent networks and/or systems for the climate crisis (e.g., disaster response and environment monitoring and sensing, hospital (including clinics) and/or other medical and healthcare applications);
• ICT transfer and innovative solutions to the climate crisis;
• Climate crisis, green initiatives and products;
• Migration, poverty and gender issues in the face of the climate crisis;
• Data-driven carbon management and climate crisis mitigation;
• Climate crisis data-driven economics, law and policy;
• Irreversible impacts of the climate crisis on tangible cultural heritage (e.g., Dunhuang caves);
• Climate crisis awareness and action strategies in the early stages of the "digitization of cultural and museums" (e.g., digital museum construction);
• Linguistics-in-education (applied linguistics and TESOL) to strengthen the climate crisis awareness and sustainability values to low-income and/or remote regions in developed and developing countries;
• Climate crisis data-driven curriculum and education;
• Human-in-the-loop crisis awareness and data-driven sustainable teaching and research workload calculation system.

Dr. William Liu
Dr. Xun Shao
Guest Editors

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