The cyber-consciousness of environmental assessment: how environmental assessments evaluate the impacts of smart, connected, and digital technology

Abstract

Digitally-enabled technologies are increasingly cyber-physical systems (CPS). They are networked in nature and made up of geographically dispersed components that manage and control data received from humans, equipment, and the environment. Researchers evaluating such technologies are thus challenged to include CPS subsystems and dynamics that might not be obvious components of a product system. Although analysts might assume CPS have negligible or purely beneficial impact on environmental outcomes, such assumptions require justification. As the physical environmental impacts of digital processes (e.g., cryptocurrency mining) gain attention, the need for explicit attention to CPS in environmental assessment becomes more salient. This review investigates how the peer-reviewed environmental assessment literature treats environmental implications of CPS, with a focus on journal articles published in English between 2010-2020. We identify nine CPS subsystems and dynamics addressed in this literature: energy system, digital equipment, non-digital equipment, automation & management, network infrastructure, direct costs, social & health effects, feedbacks, and cybersecurity. Based on these categories, we develop a “cyber-consciousness score” reflecting the extent to which the 115 studies that met our evaluation criteria address CPS, then summarize analytical methods and modeling techniques drawn from reviewed literature to facilitate routine inclusion of CPS in environmental assessment. We find that, given challenges in establishing system boundaries, limited standardization of how to evaluate CPS dynamics, and failure to recognize the role of CPS in a product system under evaluation, the extant environmental assessment literature in peer-reviewed journals largely ignores CPS subsystems and dynamics when evaluating digital or digitally-enabled technologies.

Greenhouse gas emissions embodied in electric vehicle charging infrastructure: a method and case study of Georgia, US 2021–2050

“…the charging station management system [32]. Inclusion of this digital layer in environmental assessment is important, especially as infrastructure systems become increasingly dependent on a dispersed network of data and communication facilities for their operation [21]. During use, the EVCS requires communication among chargers, station operators, and the grid for a variety of purposes including financial transactions, battery management, and charge management [33,34].…”

“…This expansion suggests a potential concern about embodied emissions in EV charging infrastructure mirroring the burden shifting concern about the EVs themselves, but this issue is not widely explored. Embodied emissions of renewable energy infrastructure has received substantial attention as part of the overall effort to direct the scale and speed of energy system decarbonization [18,19], and embodied emissions of digital infrastructure have come under similar scrutiny [20][21][22]. In particular, this issue arises because zero-carbon infrastructure will be built with carbon-based inputs until the zero-carbon system is large enough to sustain demand.…”

An integrated socio-cyber-physical system framework to assess responsible digitalisation in agriculture: A first application with Living Labs in Europe

“…In other cases, they required more statistics at local administrative levels or evidence based on strong scientific rigor. As suggested by Mulrow et al (2021), accounting for the environmental impact of digitalisation is not only a matter of multi-stakeholder platforms being conscious about the materiality and ecological dimensions, but also about the availability of statistics and well-modelled quantitative assessments that support factbased scenario analyses, while recognising also the inherent difficulties in conducting holistic, quantitative environmental assessments. Therefore, we call on for more ad-hoc research on minority and gender dynamics in digital agriculture, as well as research efforts to support participatory assessments with increased information and understanding of the environmental dependencies, costs, and impacts of stand-alone and combined digital technologies.…”

“…There are suggestions that digital agriculture may have beneficial effects on pressing sustainability matters (Kamilaris et al, 2017;Pesce et al, 2019;Schroeder et al, 2021;Wolfert et al, 2017). However, it is not just the technical performances and potential benefits of single digital technologies that are receiving growing attention from funders, technological providers and other actors at the science-policy-society interface (Lioutas et al, 2021;Mulrow et al, 2021;Rose and Chilvers, 2018;Visser et al, 2021).…”

“…insights in the field of participatory impact evaluation and responsible digitalisation in agriculture. In more detail, they contribute to including behavioural and social elements in cyber-physical systems analyses (Verdouw et al, 2021), encompassing the physical and environmental aspects in participatory evaluations of digitalisation (Mulrow et al, 2021), overcoming researchers' own agency (Stilgoe et al, 2013), dealing with power imbalances in stakeholder inclusion (van Mierlo et al, 2020), ensuring a balanced diversity of actors and views along the participatory evaluation process (Fleming et al, 2021), and building societal awareness and capacity to anticipate unexpected effects (Lange et al, 2020;Pohl and Finkbeiner, 2017;Rolandi et al, 2021). Finally, this paper provides insights on the multifaceted impacts of digitalisation, by refining on what (e.g., needs, individual entities, relationships, activities, SDGs) and how (e.g., enabling vs disenabling, boosting vs depleting effects).…”