IEEE is a large, diverse technical community with social and humanitarian obligations. The IEEE SSIT Technical Committee for Sustainability brings together members, practitioners and policy makers who have varied interests, backgrounds, and geographies, but who are all bound by a common interest in sustainable systems benefiting people and the planet.
Drawing upon our diverse community of members and the broad perspectives they enable, SSIT has the goal of advising other IEEE initiatives as well as end-user communities, governments, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations on optimizing how technology can be developed, deployed, and managed while understanding and minimizing unintended consequences, particularly to vulnerable end-user communities. This is achieved through devising mechanisms, tools and outreach.
IEEE Planet Positive 2030
In 2022, the SSIT TC Sustainability is pleased to announce its involvement with the IEEE Planet Positive 2030. Planet Positive is a program created by a global, open community of experts supported by IEEE Standards Association.
This community seeks innovation and technology-based solutions to bring humanity closer to achieving the Planet Positive goals of reducing greenhouse gas emission and significantly increasing the regeneration and resilience of Earth’s ecosystems. A diverse set of multidisciplinary experts from around the world have been invited to “translate” technological solutions for corporate and policy readers in a Compendium to guide the actions of technologists, scientific communities, as well as the private and public sectors.
Sustainability Pillars
The Sustainability Technical Committee acknowledges and welcomes the breadth of impact technology can have, with particular attention to these 3 pillars of sustainability:
- Environmental sustainability concerned with the maintenance of Earth’s “life support systems,” such as the atmosphere, oceans and soil necessary for human life and economic production.
- Social sustainability focuses on the human effects of economic systems and includes attempts to eradicate poverty and hunger, and combating inequality.
- Economic sustainability which focuses on the portion of natural resources that provide physical inputs for economic production, including both renewable and exhaustible inputs.
A sustainable approach is systems-based and seeks to understand and respond to the interdependencies of the environmental, social, and economic pillars through which society can be viewed. Such a perspective provides insights into how the internet and the work of IEEE Sustainability efforts can augment collective human intelligence through providing a basis for people-centered collaboration for more effectively addressing global problems, through developing and advancing the emergence of a new paradigm that transcends the limitations of prior national and global governance systems.
Think7
Think7 is an engagement group of leading think tanks from the G7 countries. It works to develop and propose research-based policy recommendations to support the German G7 presidency. The Think7 process is jointly coordinated by the Global Solutions Initiative and the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) (former German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) during the German G7 presidency 2022. Members of this committee participated in developing policies and contributed towards 10 out of 70 policies presented to the German G7 Presidency.
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