Technology And Collaboration Are Key To Sustainability

Marieke Flament is the CEO of the NEAR Foundation, a nonprofit that oversees sustainable Web3 development on the NEAR protocol.

After a two-year hiatus, the world’s foremost politicians, policy thinkers and business leaders were recently in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting.

According to The National, “Borge Brende, the forum’s president, said this is the most complex geopolitical and geo-economic backdrop in decades amid the war in Ukraine, the climate emergency, a weakening outlook for global economic growth, a food crisis, rising inflation and the recovery from the pandemic still relatively fragile.”

In a direct quote, he stressed, “There is no business as usual. We just need to now come together and also then move into unchartered territories.”

This is good advice. Radical action and meaningful collaboration among government, policymakers and business people are essential to progress. So too are new ways of thinking about solutions—particularly the role that technology can play in healing mother nature and bridging economic and social divides.

Progress toward a greener planet is already taking place, thanks to innovations that are unleashing the power of the new. Important developments in renewable energies, for example, are moving the world away from its dependency on oil. They are also becoming generally less expensive than fossil fuels, thanks to economies of scale and increasingly competitive supply chains.

With the rise of the conscious consumer, things like insurance pricing and corporate climate risk disclosures are helping the public recognize hazards in the products they buy and companies they support as investors. Conscious consumers are also driving the prediction that electric trucks and energy-efficient LED lighting could reach 84% market share by 2030.

New environmentally friendlier batteries like aluminium-graphite are being created to outperform conventional lithium-ion batteries, while new energy-absorbing materials like perovskites have the potential to outshine silicon in solar panels.

We also have new superconductors sending power rapidly from where it is generated to where it’s most needed with minimal wastage. It’s now possible to harness the solar energy collected in deserts to power cities while drastically decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.

The list of great tech goes on.

In this moment in history, when so much suffering is the cause of our environmental decline and battle for resources, technology can truly be a force for good. It’s also up to us as technologists to consider the sustainability of what we create and develop and to know that the past does not have to predict the future.

Breaking old patterns of behavior and thinking means prioritizing meaningful cooperation between technologists, governments and regulators. We can achieve so much more together than we can alone, and it’s clear that all corners of the tech world have roles to play—from the major players like Microsoft, which recently confirmed sustainability-focused software to help companies reach their carbon goals, to startups like EcoPing, which provides tools to reduce website carbon emissions.

Of course, technology can only be truly sustainable when it is created by a workforce that reflects the diversity of the society it serves. We need the technology of tomorrow to be built by technologists from a diverse range of backgrounds, much like how we need to create sustainability checks and balances around what we are creating.

Technology can solve many challenges, but implementing it takes careful planning and support from many stakeholders. Fortunately, they were all in Davos. Let’s hope they made some progress.

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