Earth Day 2013

Four things I’ve done this year in line with Earth Day.

1. Published a conference paper with Dan Rush suggesting that investors positively value investments in IT for managing energy and carbon emissions (rather than not valuing them because they think it’s  greenwashing). Dan is leading the effort to broaden the sample and confirm the findings under more robust conditions.

2. Finished drafting a case study examining how two organizations manage energy and carbon emissions. The study revealed numerous environmental data management challenges, including

• integrating energy and carbon management systems (ECMS) with other corporate systems to enable valid and efficient data transfer;
• importing global indirect emission data from utility companies;
• workflow processes involving multiple and iteratively emailed spreadsheets; and
• keeping spreadsheet-based systems current with the latest calculation methods and parameters.

The study recommends that firms conduct total cost of ownership analyses of ECMS adoption and that standards bodies add specific guidelines regarding information systems and their role in calculating estimation uncertainties and conducting validation checks.

3. Attended a green IS conference (Verge) in a green manner (virtually).

4. Designed, developed, and taught an MBA elective that included an online section (is virtual learning more green due to lack of commuting?) for students to learn a design thinking framework and have the opportunity to apply it to projects with a sustainability theme (transport, energy use, local food, etc.). This gets students thinking about the meaning of environmental sustainability (framing), current practices (exploring the design space and synthesizing insights), and how to concept and develop new IT-enabled solutions that satisfy human, economic, and technical constraints. Fantastic experience and student engagement!

Not enough, but it’s a start.

GHG Data Reported by U.S. Universities and Presented by EPA

I scraped the EPA website for University GHG emissions (not available for download), made a bar chart excluding those with < 50K MTCo2e in 2011, and added colors to group by climate (my own eyeballing of cold, mild, warm):

Some things to note:

1. This is not normalized on a per capita or area basis, so comparisons are tentative.
2. Top 5 emitters (MSU, Purdue, Iowa State, Michigan, Illinois) are all in the midwest.
3. UCLA is the largest emitter in a warm climate.
4. Given the nature of the data, it is unclear whether reported emissions derive from generated electricity, heating, or cooling (or other stationary sources?)
5. Not inculded in the chart are a few universities that reported with fewer than 25K (rule minimum). Not sure why this is.
6. Certain cold weather climate unis have far lower emissions (BU at 53,900) versus others in cold climates (Purdue at 408,928), probably due to how they heat buildings (but I don’t have data to back this claim up).

Thanks to the EPA for making these data visually available. Also, thanks for their ruling that these data are not confidential (allows them to release to the public). It would be great to have better analytics – top of my list would be some kind of normalization to allow for apples to apples comparisons (by sq. ft. or by heat production technology or something).

Ebay Energy/Carbon Dashboard for “Digital Service Efficiency”

 

Splits usage into infrastructure and business (former is bigger), provides summary metrics in number of transactions (related to buy or sell) per kWh (more is better), and includes carbon emissions per user, server, and MW. Not realtime numbers, though quarterly updates planned.

View the dashboard here and the explanation here.

Learning about Climate Change

Here are some useful sources for learning about climate change. While I can’t verify the accuracy of all the content on all the pages below, I have found them to be useful to my own learning.

• Climate Change at the National Academies of Science contains summaries of scientific knowledge.
• European Environment Agency contains evidence, policies, and activities.
• Skeptical Science explains what peer-reviewed science has to say about global warming.
• LearnStuff has an interesting infographic with citations to support its claims.

Perhaps in the future, each page above could contain a section on the role of information systems as villain (e-waste, energy use, etc.) and hero (enabler of solutions). It’s the digital age after all.

Green IS Scholarship at Annual 2012/2013 Conferences

ICIS in Orlando featured several green IS  papers, as did HICSS in Hawaii (see below). Most papers addressed issues concerning the use of IS for enabling enhanced corporate environmental sustainability, while a few dealt with server / network energy use. The research stream does appear to be moving out of emergence phase. On this point, Watson and colleagues suggest that we are entering a new dominant logic of sustainability in information systems. To build momentum further, we need: a) better development of core constructs; b) theory development to address new wicked problems; c) better empirical modeling to capture distinctiveness of new settings. Below is a list of papers [with occasional thoughts from me].

Impact of Green IS

“Organizational Self-Renewal: The Role of Green IS in Developing Eco-Effectiveness“  Jonas Hedman, Stefan Henningsson – Copenhagen Business School, Lisen Selander – University of Gothenburg.
[From abstract: Insight #1: Green IS initiatives cannot be studied in isolation from other sustainable initiatives, since they are re-enforcing each other. Insight #2: Green IS initiatives can act as ‘motors’ towards eco-effectiveness, in bridging competing models of organizational effectiveness.]

“The Influence of Mobile Product Information on Brand Perception and Willingness to Pay for Green and Sustainable Products,” Hannah Winkler von Mohrenfels – Goethe University, Daniel Klapper – Humboldt University.

“Does Environmental Performance Affect Organizational Performance? Evidence from Green IT Organizations,” Rohit Nishant, Thompson Teo, Mark Goh, Satish Krishnan – National University of Singapore. [Some evidence of a connection in a sample limited to green IT organizations].

Green IS Research and Development

“Matching Economic Efficiency and Environmental Sustainability: The Potential of Exchanging Excess Capacity in Cloud Service Environments,” Christoph Dorsch, Bjoern Haeckel – Augsburg University

“An Organizing Vision Perspective on Green IS Development,” Karl Fradley – Environment Protection Authority, Indrit Troshani – University of Adelaide, Giselle Camille Rampersad – Flinders University, Paul De Ionno – South Australian Government

“IS Sustainability Research: A Trans-disciplinary Framework for a ‘Grand Challenge’,” Dirk S Hovorka -  Bond  University, Jacqueline Corbett – Laval University

“The Emergence of Sustainability as the New Dominant Logic: Implications for Information Systems,” Richard T Watson – University of Georgia, Mikael Lind, Sandra Haraldson – Viktoria Institute [From abstract: It is argued that the current customer service dominant logic is being replaced or complemented by a sustainability dominant logic, which reflects the growing concern with environmental issues].

Green IS/IT Initiative

“A Sustainability Model of Green IT Initiatives,” Krishnadas Nanath, Radhakrishna R Pillai – Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode

“The Influence of Reference Frame  and Population Density on the Effectiveness of Social Normative Feedback on Electricity Consumption,” Claire-Michelle Loock – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Jan R. Landwehr – Goethe-University Frankfurt, Thorsten Staake – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Elgar Fleisch – University of St. Gallen Alexander (Sandy) Pentland – Massachussetts Institute of Technology [From abstract: reference groups that are close in terms of geographical proximity are more effective than more distant groups. However, population density does not moderate this effect. Designer of green information systems should therefore use reference groups that are close to the energy consumer with regard to geographical proximity, but they do not need to tailor the intervention to the energy consumer’s location.]

“Towards a Typology of Green IS Strategies: Insights from Case Study Research,” Fabian Loeser, Koray Erek, Ruediger Zarnekow – Technical University  of  Berlin. [From author: "In the scope of four real-life case studies, Loeser et al. (2012) found  that Green IS have great potential for leveraging firm competitiveness. Even so, most companies confine their actions to the implementation of simple efficiency-increasing measures that target operational cost reductions. The authors point out that the full potential of Green IS can only be leveraged if environmental aspects are addressed through corporate, competitive, and functional strategies."]

ICIS also featured a panel on “Green Information Systems Directions: Directives for the IS Discipline” (on which I participated).

HICSS in Hawaii also had several tracks with an environmental sustainability theme

[IEEE has yet to post: coming soon]

When it comes to climate change, why study organizations?

Sometimes I get this question. As an empiricist, I tend to respond with data to support my reasoning. In preparing for a January research talk on the adoption of carbon management systems (which help firms to manage and reduce carbon emissions), I prepared the following slide to quantify an estimate for CO2 emissions for organizations.

It was not straightforward, due to GHG accounting complexities such as how do we know the percentage of business use of US highways/roads versus non-business use (e.g., a personal trip trip to the grocery store). Anyhow, thanks to the US Department of State’s US Climate Action Report 2010, I was able to compute a rough estimate that for 2007  organizations accounted for 39-47% of total US GHG emissions. This is a significant percentage, and given the enormous footprints of global corporations, GHG reduction initiatives in organizations can have a significant impact on overall emission reductions (think WalMart).

Anyhow, here’s the slide. Input on how to improve this estimate is welcome.

PwC: “Business as usual is not an option”

Consultancies periodically weigh in on macro issues that affect business organizations, such as climate change.

While typically not peer reviewed, these analyses can offer interesting insights, food for thought, and suggest areas for academic research.

PwC recently published a report describing their view of what’s needed in order to stabilize CO2 concentrations and provide a 50% probability of limiting warming to 2 deg C: “Too late for two degrees? Low carbon economy index 2012“. The graph above encapsulates the analysis.

While the study does not address the question of how we might make these reductions (see here for an example), it does reinforce a stark message to business and government leaders: business as usual is not an option (consistent with climate science analysis).

Happy thanksgiving.