Environmental Policy

The public sector provides some approaches to contribute to sustainability by making use of ICT. But the role of public institutions in establishing a low carbon economy has to be seen as more comprehensive. The governmental agencies have to fulfill the institutional dimension of the concept of sustainable development. They have to plan, monitor, control and asses sustainable development in order to meet the social, environmental and economic aims of this process. This involves the definition of a strategy and goals, the use of systems and facilities for monitoring, platforms and channels for the distribution of information, as well as capabilities to take action to correct course. The Climate Group sees the responsibility of policy makers in sending “clear signals that overall emissions reduction will be required” and setting up “appropriate policy frameworks” [1]. ICT can provide supportive systems for most of these responsibilities and the enforcement of an environmental policy:

• Decision support systems for creating strategies and taking actions on the basis of profound data. 
• Monitoring systems to assess compliance with regulations and constraints in the economic sectors. Especially the compliance to greenhouse gas emission policies have to be monitored. Also the achievement of sustainability objectives can be monitored by ICT systems using business ratios and benchmarks. 
• Information platforms, accessible via the Internet or other communication technologies, can serve to increase the common awareness of sustainability issues. This could help gaining acceptance of strategies and policies and inspire individual participation. 

The need for ICT as enabling technology partly results from the fact, that dealing with environmental issues involves the observation of complex systems. To reach the environmental, social, political and economic goals conforming to sustainable development decision support systems are needed, due to the overwhelming complexity of this context. Such systems enable the storage and management of data records and ratios, analyzing real time data and trends of environmental processes, forecasting and other supportive functions. A possible approach to serve such decision making support are information systems based on a multi-agent architecture [2]. The multi-agent paradigm allows to model complex systems in order to “understand the real nature of the processes, their influence and interconnections, and the possible outcomes in order to make preventive actions and to make correct decisions” [2].

The environmental policies assigned by governments have to contain incentives for several stakeholders involved in the process of establishing sustainable development. In the building sector there have to be increased regulations on building standards, promoting energy efficient building materials and systems. Subsidies by the public sector could give incentives to the business and private sector to increasingly integrate energy efficient technology. An example are low interest loans for renovations of buildings regarding energy performance [3]. This could help to address the current waste of energy by inefficient building design [4]. As a concrete example microgeneration heat technologies can be mentioned, which are still a market niche and not commonly adopted. Subsidies and price reductions combined with advanced information on the possibilities and suitabilities of these technologies, highlighting advantages and benefits could force to speed up adoption process. The uncertainty about performance and payback periods among potential users can still be considered as one of the main reason for non-adoption [5]. Additionally there is the widespread opinion that energy efficient buildings generally implicate higher capital costs, which leads to the reliance on established building designs in many cases, without even considering to make use of more energy efficient technology [3]. This underpins the importance of information and education on the topic of energy efficiency and the possibilities of sustainable development.

An important governmental incentive in the transport sector is the “encouragement of greater investment in public transport infrastructure [4]. There have to be economical benefits by the use of public transportation, to reduce dependence on fuel-based transportation methods. The governmental actions could also include the assignment of additional taxes on fuel and emissions from the transport sector, as well as increased taxes on road usage and vehicles with high fuel demand. As air pollution is a major topic in transport too, policies on tightened pollutant standards have to be assigned [3]. In the industrial sector the most common incentives on emissions reductions are negotiated voluntary agreements and tax reductions for investments in energy efficient technology [3]. In relation to the enabling potential of ICT, governments should establish information initiatives to propagate the benefits of energy efficient technologies and their potential application areas.

The development of energy efficient technologies like ICT, which have the potential to reduce carbon emissions by energy savings, strongly depends on investments in research and development (R&D). Data on research investments of the 28 IEA member states shows that the money spent on energy efficient technologies and renewable sources of energy stagnated over the past decades (c.f. figure 1, being highly correlated to the development of the oil price [3]. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the support for energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy was increased due to the high oil price [3], but at the same time the budget for research on nuclear energy was raised by roughly the same proportion. For many years the budgets for research and development in the areas of fossil fuels and nuclear power have been significantly higher than these for research done on renewable energy sources and energy efficient technologies.

Figure 1: Development of the allocation of the total R&D budget of IEA member states (in Million Euro) by energy sector from 1974 to 2010 (data from [6])

Given the current environmental issue of climate change, there have to be increased investments in R&D of energy efficiency and renewable energy to reach long-term emissions reductions and achieve carbon-free energy generation. Actual data of 2010 shows that the trend of investments has already started to change in some countries (c.f. figure 2). In Germany the support of R&D of fossil fuels has the smallest share of all energy sectors, as it is in the United States of America. The USA spent most of the R&D budget for energy in 2010 on energy efficiency and renewable energy. Japan strongly supported nuclear energy in 2010, but after the disaster of Fukushima in March of 2011 a rethinking process started and 14 out of 17 nuclear power plants in Japan have been taken offline until January of 2012 [7].

By considering the statistics of 2010 of the R&D budgets of all IEA member states in total, it gets apparent that the share of research done on fossil fuels was smaller compared to other energy sectors, including renewable energy sources (c.f. figure 3). Nuclear power still has the largest governmental support, but the gap to renewable sources of energy tends to get smaller, as it is shown in figure 1.

Figure 2: Allocation of R&D budgets of selected IEA member states (in Million Euro) by energy sector in 2010 (data from [6])

Figure 3: Allocation of the total R&D budget of IEA member states by energy sector (in Million Euro) in 2010 (data from [6])

References

[1] The Climate Group. Smart 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age. Technical report, The Climate Group on behalf of the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), 2008.

[2] M. V. Sokolova and A. Fernandez-Caballero. Multi-agent systems technology for composite decision making in complex systems. In Sustainability in Energy and Buildings, pages 29–38. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009.

[3] L.D.D. Harvey. Energy and the new reality 1: Energy Efficiency and the Demand for Energy services. Earthscan, 2010.

[4] G. Philipson. Ict’s role in the low carbon economy. Technical report, Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), 2010.

[5] S. Caird and R. Roy. Adoption and use of household microgeneration heat technologies. Low Carbon Economy, 1(2):61–70, December 2010.

[6] International Energy Agency (IEA). RD&D Statistics. http://www.iea.org/stats/rd.asp. Accessed: 2013-03-05.

[7] K. Lah. U.N. Experts OK Japan’s nuclear ’stress tests’. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/31/world/asia/japan-nuclear/index.html, January 2012. Accessed: 2013-03-05.