News
Update: January 2012
Exploring the relationship between ICTs and carbon emissions
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) can have profound effects on our world by improving economic productivity increasing energy efficiency, and reducing the cost of renewable energy. But what about their overall impact on carbon emissions? In a recently published article in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Jonathan Moyer and Barry Hughes explore this question with IFs. They argue that the acceleration of ICT penetration can help promote an overall reduction in carbon emissions, and that the strongest path for this reduction is through lowering the price of renewable energy (for example, by being a catalyst for wide-spread use of smart grids). However, their analysis suggests the net impact of ICTs on carbon emissions is limited. Moyer and Hughes conclude that if governments are serious about reducing stocks of carbon emissions, the promotion of ICTs needs to be coupled with an effectively-regulated global price on carbon emissions. (Research for this project was originally sponsored by the European Commission Information Society and Media Directorate General in 2009.)
Mohammod T. Irfan meets with members of the UNESCO Education for All team
Mohammod Irfan introduced the IFs modeling system to a number of the members of the UNESCO Education for All Global Monitoring Report team in Paris in early December. At the meeting, Dr. Irfan demonstrated the IFs system, with special emphasis on the structure and forecasts of the education model. Global Monitoring Report team members showed interest in various aspects of the IFs representation of education, especially its integration with the forecasts of other key sub-models, such as the economy, government, and health.
International Futures online version on Wikipedia
As noted in last month’s newsletter, the static URLs produced by the online version of IFs can be emailed or embedded in web pages. These links have increasingly been embedded on Wikipedia by friends of the Pardee Center as well as individuals new to us. For example, see links to IFs Country Profile pages on Wikipedia entries for China, Ethiopia, Germany, Japan, Poland and the United States. We are glad that others are learning about us through these links and finding IFs useful!