Sustainability/research
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This is a page by the Sustainability Community Group to support generating a common terminology, collecting research, and developing methodologies for horizontal reviews of web standards.
The internet has played an important role in promoting the transition of society and economy from the industrial to the information era. In so doing, it has changed how we experience the environment, without which an understanding of anthropogenic global climate change wouldn't have been possible. Now, the same technology is imagined to provide the necessary means to become more sustainable. It is crucial however, that the balancing act of sustainability through and of the Internet is avoiding maladaptations, which would lead to the opposite of their intended effect – increasing the vulnerability of our society to the climate emergency rather than decreasing it. The transformative potential of web technologies, on the energy sector specifically and the economy and society in general, puts web standards at the center of discussions about sustainable development and begs for in depth and cross-disciplinary deliberation.
We begin this effort by focusing on the following two questions:
- What are sustainability impacts of key web standards?
- How is sustainability currently accounted for in web standard development?
Key Terminologies
In order to facilitate a collective confrontation of the questions and understanding of related concepts we will here define key terminologies.