February 15, 2025

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New Frontiers in Technology: Can Innovation Solve the Climate and Sustainability Crises?

Consider the arc of change unleashed by just one technological device.

In 2007 a new gadget called the iPhone burst onto the market. In the 18 years since, the smart phone has reinvented the world. Almost 7 billion people hold in hand a device that instantly sends messages across the globe (roughly 23 billion of them a day), navigates journeys, pays bills, records videos, takes photos, provides entertainment, trolls the internet, serves as a means of distraction and disruption, pings the important and frivolous news of the day, and so captures attention that has raised concerns about its impacts on interpersonal skills, societal cohesion, and the mental health of young people. The phone call, eclipsed by so many other possibilities, can feel quaint.

The smart phone offers an apt emblem of the power of technology to transform in profound ways. As the world confronts the climate crisis, it is little wonder that it is leaning ever harder onto technology, what futurist Alvin Toffler called that “great, growling engine of change”.

The breakneck pace of technological innovations contrasts vividly with sluggish political progress and backsliding. The gap between political pledges and progress is wide and growing. Greenhouse gas emissions have yet to peak. Global temperatures continue to rise to record levels.

We live in a time of proliferating technologies that are “indistinguishable from magic”, as the futurist, explorer and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke put it. The world has the know-how to edit human genes, devise a World Wide Web of information, and create artificial intelligence. Yet, nearly a century and a half after the invention of the lightbulb, humanity has yet to find the wherewithal to bring more than a billion people out of utter dark. Now the world seeks the technological ingenuity to fix the unanticipated fallout from the wonder technology of another age that discovered how to harness the power from burning fossil fuels.

And so the question surfaces: Can the world “technovate” its way out of the intertwined climate, environment and sustainable development crises?

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