Emergent Solutions for Global Climate Change: Lessons from Green IS Research

In the emerging field of Green IT/IS, a figure of 2% is often quoted as the percentage of environmentally harmful emissions attributed to the use of IT and the IT industry. The term „Green IT‟ is now part of our vocabulary recognizing the problem of IT as a polluter and the responsibility of IT professionals to do something about it. On the other hand there is a counter argument that in IT and IS we have the potential and opportunity to positively influence the global environmental future – in other words, develop Green IS to reduce the other 98%. Historically, the value added by IS has been its ability to realign and reinvent business processes in support of productivity and efficiency. Given the urgent need for progress on Climate Change, we argue it is the duty of IS academics, researchers, and practitioners to reorient IS, and develop new IS practices that optimize processes in support of sustainable outcomes. This argument is supported by the proven ability of IS to transform business processes. In this paper we describe the Climate Change problem as an example of a „wicked problem,‟ and argue that IS research has often demonstrated that imposed, top down solutions are ineffective for highly complex problems. In contrast, bottom up, emergent solutions have been shown to have more promise for creating real change. This paper reviews and reports Green IS research to