Dagstuhl Workshop: "Climate Change: What is Computing’s Responsibility?"

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This past week me and 25 other researchers (see image above) attended a Dagstuhl workshop on the topic "Climate Change: What is Computing’s Responsibility?" (see the invitation below). My first thought was to think about this in terms of 1) what is computing's responsibility as to causing climate change and 2) what is computing's responsibility as to solving climate change.

The venue, "Schloss Dagstuhl, the Leibniz Center for Informatics was originally founded in 1990 to provide a retreat for world class research and training in computer science", and what they do is to host week-long scientific workshops all year round. This was my third visit to Dagstuhl and the set-up is very much like that of the Lorentz Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Both Dagstuhl and the Lorentz Center provide infrastructure and support to organise really nice scientific workshops, and both organise two parallell workshops each week most weeks of the year. While I have attended three in-person workshop at each of these two centers, I have been the organiser of two Lorentz workshops (including this workshop in 2018), but have myself never been part of organising a Dagstuhl workshop.

Dagstuhl itself is situated "in the middle of nowhere", and it's not very easy to get there. I travelled from Stockholm by train together with my colleague, professor of environmental strategies and futures studies Mattias Höjer, passing by Frankfurt and then heading south-west towards the border between Germany, France and Belgium. The great thing about finding yourself in the middle of nowhere is however that there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Except get to know and talk to the other workshop participants at meals, as part of the workshop activities and in the evening (over a beer or a glass of wine).

The workshop was organised by Bran Knowles at Lancaster University and Vicki Hanson of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and I knew about a quarter of the participants well and had previously met another quarter either at LIMITS workshops or at ICT4S conferences. It was however very unfortunate that Bran could not attend in person, but instead participated remotely through Zoom. That didn't always work very well, because it's hard to remotely lead 25 people when you are the only person who's not in the room, so things were a bit confused at times. Fortunately the people attending were driven, motivated and interested in the topic - but it was still not always easy. It would probably have been a good idea for Bran to have asked someone on-site to help out with practical aspects of leading the workshop in advance (including simple things like smoothly dividing people into group and just making sure the program flowed). The very first night Lenneke Kuijer and me talked about physically reorganising the furniture and the seating arrangements in the room and it was a pity I had forgotten all about it the next day. 

Apart from my previous two Dagstuhl workshop, this was not a week-long event but rather a three-day "perspectives workshop", and it's apparently a requirement that the workshop report to Dagstuhl includes a manifesto. We worked concretely with the manifesto on the last day of the workshop, but we didn't finish it and I suppose the heaviest burden now lies on the organisers to get it together. My personal contribution was taking copious notes and pasting some of them into the document we used for drafting the manifesto. I had a very nice talk (break-out session) with Birgit Penzenstadler and Colin Venters on day two and it resulted in this short summary (input to the manifesto):

• This is the problem:

• Computing (including AI) increases the speed at which we pursue (or reach) (societal) goals

• If we are moving in an unsustainable direction, computing and AI will help us get there faster

• Assuming this makes sense, what should go into the manifesto?

• We should not focus on specific technologies (like AI), but rather on changing incentive structures away from an economic growth paradigm.

I would have thought that this would be more or less uncontroversial, but many interesting divisions appeared when we sat down and started to pen the actual manifesto on the third and last day. One division within our group mirrors something that has repeatedly appeared inside European Green (political) parties, namely a tension between "fundamentalists" and  "realists", where the former are principled and the latter are more pragmatic and want to compromise in order to gain influence here and now. So if we are writing a manifesto about what computing's responsibility is and what computing could do, should we then (gloves-off) "tell it as it is", or should we for strategic reasons avoid controversial position ("economic growth is problematic") and instead aim for the largest possible audience by using milder, less pointed formulations? Can the current system be reformed from the inside or are more fundamental changes necessary? And what about capitalism, does it automatically leads to economic growth, increased carbon emissions and climate change, or is capitalism just a "vehicle" that could be utilised for other purposes, e.g. to decrease carbon emissions and the risk of climate change? These were some of the discussions that surfaced on the third and last day, and I myself thought it was very refreshing to understand the difference in participants' worldviews after we all had mostly agreed (e.g. avoided controversy) for several days. 

Since Bran was not present, she initially suggested all breakout group conversation should be recorded through our phones and uploaded to a shared folder where she/we could listen to the recordings. That suggestion did not go down well as some participants doubted the integrity of shared online folders on services that are hosted by US tech giants. That quickly turned into a discussion about privacy, surveillance and the situation for US researchers who work on "controversial" topics like climate change. A highlight in that discussion was when Vlad Coroama stood up and said that "as the only person in this room who grew up in a dictatorship" [in Ceaușescu's Romania], the greatest problem is when people start to censor themselves". I thought it was, well, hilarious that having personal experiences of growing up in a dictatorship now has become a hard currency that garners attention and ensures that your words will met with respect.

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Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 25122

Climate Change: What is Computing’s Responsibility?

( Mar 16 – Mar 19, 2025 )

This Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop aims to provide a forum for world-leading computer scientists and expert consultants on environmental policy and sustainable transition to engage in a critical and urgent conversation about computing’s responsibilities in addressing climate change. The workshop will consider the positive and negative climate impacts of a range branches of computing, including (but not limited to): AI and Machine Learning; Software and Mechanical Engineering; Internet Architectures; Large-scale, Distributed, and Cloud-based systems; Environmental Data Science and Climate Modelling; ICT Environmental Assessment and Energy-Aware Computing; Smart Cities, Smart Grid, and Transition Engineering; Safety and Security; and Human-Computer Interaction and ICT for Sustainability.

Day 1: Tracking and reducing computing’s emissions. Attendees will deliberate on the scale of carbon reductions needed within the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) sector, discuss technical advancements that can be deployed to rapidly reduce emissions, and consider how to develop and manage climate change compliance processes in the face of methodological challenges in measuring ICT emissions.

Day 2: Maximizing the net positive impact of computing. Discussion will focus on the ways computing can be applied to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis, including the harnessing of digital solutions to enable emissions reductions across the wider economy, and how the societal benefits of computing (e.g. enabling of other Sustainable Development Goals) can be maximized while seriously constraining carbon emissions.

Day 3: Creating a manifesto. Each year at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (commonly known as COP) countries pledge nationally determined contributions in the fight against climate change; at this workshop we will answer the question, “What is computing’s pledge?” Together, we will produce a Dagstuhl Manifesto that outlines a strategic plan for computing to materially contribute to the meeting of climate targets and specifies mechanisms for tracking and incentivizing progress.

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Sustainability and AI - public conversation about "Dark Machines" with author Victor Galaz

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This week I moderated a talk about a just-out book on sustainability and AI, "Dark Machines: How Artificial Intelligence, Digitalization and Automation is Changing our Living Planet". This activity is part of the KTH-housed cross-disciplinary research centre Digital Futures' reoccurring book conversations where authors are invited to present and talk about their books. Dark Machines is published by Routledge (which unfortunately means that it's quite expensive) and the book's own homepage can be found here.

The author, Victor Galaz is a political scientist and a climate scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Center. What I appreciate about the book is that it's a sustainability-first book about AI, and not an AI-first Pollyannish book about how AI can solve all environmental problems (past, present and future*). Galaz' instead believes that calls such as "AI for Good", "AI for Climate" and "AI for the Planet" mostly represents a very shallow views of what AI could do (perhaps, maybe, if we all just came together) and of the likely effects of AI in relation to sustainability (e.g. bordering on greenwashing). Galaz' book instead starts off with the state of the planet (not good), the direction we are going in (it's getting worse year-on-year), what AI already is used for today, the impacts on the living planet (usually quite or very problematic) and what AI could do and sometimes actually does (hopeful - but not enough). 

The book runs through different aspects of AI (and digitalisation and automation), but the definition of "AI" is broad and fuzzy and I would personally not refer to it as "AI" but rather just as "computing (including AI)". So computing (now-with-more-AI) changes agriculture and land-use, how we monitor and measure this-and-that (in the often misguided hope that things will change for the better just because we have more precise data), algorithmic bias, cryptocurrencies and blockchain (""blockchainification" of carbon offsets [is] the combination of two bad ideas, merged into one terrible [idea]"), how capital and financial markets shape the planet, how (unintentionally inaccurate) misinformation and (deliberately false or misleading) disinformation increases, how data about emotions are collected and mined and how polarisation in society increases. And how we use computing to seek increased control, optimisation, efficiency, and productivity, how black box models makes just about everything less transparent and harder to understand (decreasing the chances of (democratic) control) and how rewards and risks are redistributed (leading to increased inequality). And much more that is troubling and problematic. 

The book has ten chapters and the second to last chapter discusses resistance while the last chapter outlines what "planetary responsible AI" could be. The remainder of the book is a litania of problems and troubles. The discussion we had at the event was for the most part gloomy because while there are some really nice examples of AI being used for beneficial purposes, there are many more examples of AI being used to further current (unsustainable) goals in society. 

We organised the 10th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability (ICT4S) in Stockholm in June last year. I reached out to Victor at the time to invite him as a keynote speaker with the intention that he would talk about his (what I thought was his) just-to-be-published book. The conference unfortunately didn't fit his schedule, so it was very nice to (finally) have the opportunity not just to hear him talk about the book but to also read it and have the privilege to also talk to and query the author. 

Here's the blurb from the book's back cover:

This book offers a critical primer on how Artificial Intelligence and digitalization are shaping our planet and the risks posed to society and environmental sustainability.

As the pressure of human activities accelerates on Earth, so too does the hope that digital and artificially intelligent technologies will be able to help us deal with dangerous climate and environmental change. Technology giants, international think-tanks and policy-makers are increasingly keen to advance agendas that contribute to “AI for Good” or “AI for the Planet." Dark Machines explores why it is naïve and dangerous to assume converging forces of a growing climate crisis and technological change will act synergistically to the benefit of people and the planet. It explores why AI and associated digital technologies may lead to accelerated discrimination, automated inequality, and augmented diffusion of misinformation, while simultaneously amplifying risks for people and the planet. We face a profound challenge. We can either allow AI accelerate the loss of resilience of people and our planet, or we can decide to act forcefully in ways that redirects its destructive direction.

This urgent book will be of interest to students and researchers with an interest in Artificial Intelligence, digitalization and automation, social and political dimensions of science and technology, and sustainability sciences.

* That's obviously a joke, because however powerful AI is, it could hardly solve any problems in the past...

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Isak Stoddard about living in perilious times (ph.d. thesis)

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I attended two related events this past week. The first was a lunch seminar by world renowned climate scientist Kevin Anderson and the second was Isak Stoddard's dissertation dinner & party. These two events are related because Kevin Anderson is a co-supervisor of Isak's.

Kevin Anderson passed KTH by on the way to Uppsala and gave a 90-minute lunch talk (abstract below) entitled "“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”: from Paris to Sweden without the denial". He is Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester but he is also affiliated with the Centre for Sustainability and the Environment (CEMUS) at Uppsala University. 

While he is a professor and well-known (in some circles) for his research, I believe he is mostly known for his very frank, in-your-face talks about where we are and what lies ahead of us climate-wise. He is also well-known for never flying and based on this text it seems he took that decision almost 20 years ago... As apart from most other scientists (not to mention politicians) he doesn't hold back and tells it like it is:

On YouTube you can find a talk (90 minutes) that he gave at Uppsala University last month (Feb 12), "The New Denialism: Climate Change - from the Paris Agreement to Sweden" and a quick glance and the slides in the talk (video) indicates that it's similar to the talk I attended.

When I heard Kevin's talk, I put two and two together and realised Kevin was on his way to Uppsala to attend Isak Stoddard dissertation the following day. Isak is an acquaintance and our paths have crossed a few times over the years. Isak presented his Ph.D. thesis, "Perilous times: Carbon budgets and the cosmopolitics of climate mitigation" Friday this past week (March 7).

I had been invited to the public defence and the subsequent dinner, but had not reacted quick enough and thus missed the deadline. After having listened to Kevin's lunch talk, I however felt that while I couldn't with short notice spend the whole day in Uppsala, I could at least ask Isak if it was possible to join the dinner - perhaps there was a last-minute cancellation? I sent a mail directly after the lunch talk and lo and behold, I got a quick answer that it was indeed possible to attend the dinner. When I left KTH that same evening, I told my colleague Elina I was going to Uppsala and was surprised to see also her and her husband Jonas at the dinner (she asked even later than I did). 

Isak (as well as Kevin) also has strong ties to Uppsala University's "Centre for Sustainability and the Environment" (CEMUS). CEMUS is a student-initiated, transdisciplinary centre that offers undergraduate and masters level sustainability courses and many of the guests at the dinner had been or were currently active at CEMUS or had been active there five or ten years ago. I don't have a connection to CEMUS but still know upwards to 10 or possibly 15% of the 100+ guests at the dinner and had a great time there!

It was hard to get a world in edgewise with Isak as many others wanted to talk to him, so I don't know what's next for him. I do however wish him the best and expect that our paths will continue to cross now and then also in the future...

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Kevin Anderson, “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”: from Paris to Sweden without the denial (lunch talk)

Abstract:

The saccharine headlines of recent COPs barely disguise the deliberate failure of national leaders, whether in politics, business or indeed journalism, to address the climate emergency. But peer a little deeper and the cossetted realm of academia is also revealed to be have been a crucial player in this endemic failure. From normalising deeply fraudulent technical futures to embedding neo-colonial norms in virtually all IPCC scenarios, our fingerprints are evident. Some of us have actively engaged in this systemic bias, whilst others have lent it legitimacy through our expedient silence. In 2025, wilful ignorance can no-longer be a defence.

Set against this damning indictment, Kevin Anderson will seek to lay bare the sheer quantitative scale of the gaping void between the rhetoric and the reality of our Paris Commitments. Unpicking the technical utopias and methodical avoidance of anything that would question existing power structures, Kevin will demonstrate that there are now no non-radical futures. The choice is between a profound but organised shake-up of structural and technical norms and societal values, or waiting a little longer for chaotic and violent social change.

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Isak Stoddard, "Perilous times: Carbon budgets and the cosmopolitics of climate mitigation" (ph.d. dissertation)

Abstract:

Increasingly emphatic warnings from scientists about the dire consequences of global climate change has contributed to the establishment of an international governance regime and a world-wide proliferation of policies and actions that in different ways attempt to mitigate the problem. However, the decades that have passed since the publication of the first IPCC report in 1990, have been beset by an inexorable rise in global greenhouse gas emissions, with more fossil carbon anthropogenically released into the atmosphere than previously throughout history. With the cumulative nature of emissions and rapidly dwindling size of global carbon budgets, achieving mitigation at rates concomitant with the Paris Agreement becomes increasingly urgent and challenging as time passes. This thesis explores the imaginaries, temporalities and practices involved in historical and ongoing efforts to mitigate climate change at global as well as national, regional and local levels in Sweden. The climate policy framework of Sweden is first analysed and found to fall far short of delivering on the temperature and equity commitments of the Paris Agreement. Factors contributing to the absence of a globally proportionate response are then reviewed, where a key impediment to mitigation is found to reside in various forms of power – from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Attention is then shifted to the Swedish counties of Uppsala and Gotland, where the temporalities of urgency and acceleration accompanying emerging (net) zero carbon imaginaries are seen to have the paradoxical effect of raising fundamental and difficult questions for regional planning while also risking to undermine its capacity for envisioning alternative futures. Moving closer to the ground, a series of walking interviews reveals everyday possibilities for escaping ineffective and extractive responses to the climate crisis amongst practitioners involved in the ongoing urban development of Ulleråker, in the city of Uppsala. The findings of this thesis collectively suggest that our times are perilous in at least three ways: In the escalating effects of the climate crisis, in the responses conceived to address the problem, and in the forms of attention that the accompanying temporalities give rise to

Sociocracy

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I went to a two-hour Sociocracy workshop in October, and Sociocracy is as well all know 😀 a "peer governance system based on consent". Can't say I know too much about it, but I found it to be an interesting form of governance and decision-making somewhere in-between top-down hierarchies and flat organisations. 

While we enter discussions with a clear idea of "this is what I want", Sociocracy askes "what you are willing to..." - what you can work with and what you can live with?. That shift in perspective expands the area of possible consent and increases the chance that we can find ways of moving forward that all parties can live with - even if they don't love it. And there additionally needs to be consent before a decision is taken, and objections are taken seriously and seen as a gift. If you really really object to a decision, that means it needs to be further discussed and possibly revised/altered in ways that takes the objection into account. Here's an example of Sociocratic principles at work:

"I have five children. [...] If I ask them, "what do you want for lunch?", then I lost already. [...] Instead, I need to ask for ideas for lunch. Out of those ideas, I pick something and propose it. Let's say I want to propose burritos. The question I need to ask is not: Do you want burritos for lunch?". The question is: "Is there any reason not to have burritos for lunch?". That way, now the family member that has a reason not to eat burritos will be able to say so. But if one child really wanted noodles but is willing to go for burritos, we can still make a decisions. I've set the expectation to what people are willing to do, not what they want to do."

Ok, that's the short version and there's a lot more to it. And the Swedish Transition Network (Omställningsnätverket) had asked one of their partners, Holma Folkhögskola [Holma folk high school/adult education center], to organise a course in Sociocracy that was tailored to their needs - and I wanted in and tagged along. I went to Holma with the intention of learning more about Sociocracy (I in fact read a book just to prepare for the weekend), but the joke was on me as all the other 20 participants were there not just to learn about Sociocracy, but to also reshape the way the Swedish Transition Network itself functions, based on Sociocratic principles. So while I just wanted to lean back and learn, and had definitely not planned to take on any commitments (too busy), everyone else wanted action and were prepared to roll up their sleeves and find their place and their role in the new governance structure for the Swedish Transition Network. 

At one point early in the weekend there was a round, and people stated what they were ready and willing to contribute with. I wasn't prepared and didn't know what I was willing to do, but fortunately Sofie from Gothenburg (a new acquaintance, lots of bantering, front row, second from the left) said that me and her should work on setting up a "humor group". That sounded like a terrific idea and discussing and shaping what such a group could contribute to the larger movement became my personal entry point to the remainder of the weekend. And so for me personally, it turned out there are two roles that I'm willing to do for the Transition Network. 

Both of there roles support the Event "circle" (Sociocracy lingo for group), which is a sub-circle to the General circle. And the Event circle has sub-circles of its own of which the most important is the Annual Conference (that I want to in October and where I first learned about Sociocracy). So the "boring" role that I'm prepared to play is to help with the conference, and I'm especially interested in creating a structure (a memory) that can help transfer knowledge between conferences, since the annual conferences are organised by a new team in a different part of the country each year. The more "exciting" role is to help shape a sub-circle to the Event circle that I proposed should be called "The resource group". That is a very anonymous name (by design), and it doesn't say anything about what that group is and what it is supposed to do. I am however thinking of this group as a "traveling circus" or a "travelling theatre company" that will help liven up events by bringing fun to them. So the resource group could contain any and all of the following; a clown, a buffoon, a mime artist, a ventriloquist, a puppeteer, a jester, a juggler, a stand-up artist, improvisational theatre, and of course musicians. Four persons were willing to help out with different parts of what the Event circle plans to do, but I believe the resource group currently consists of only Sofie and me, although I have two named persons I would like to recruit (AA, a clown/actor and AL, a poet/actor/musician). 

There were a lot of creative suggestions proposed during the weekend and it could be that the newly formed Event group will plan and organise not just the annual conference, but also additional events (two persons in this group had in fact worked as event planners). 

Each group (circle) got a form to fill out and here's a subset of what I formulated for the "humor group":

• "Goal (and how does it relate to our vision, our mission and our principles?)": Work with humour, playfulness, events, embodied exercises, interventions and performances.
• "Domain (what do we make autonomous decisions about, when do we need to transfer things back to the General circle?)": Shape a new role for our group that will include making the annual conference more fun and alive.
• "Roles, policies (what roles, policies and routines does the circuit take care of?)": Develop (anti-) rites, rituals and ceremonies, support local organisations with structure and content, support the board with using the annual conference (and other events) "strategically". 
• "Influence (what do we need from other circles, what do other circles need from us?)" We drew a blank here and it's empty for now.

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