Digitalisierung

As part of the European Green Deal, the EU has committed to making European product markets more sustainable, with circularity playing a key role. To achieve this goal, the EU is planning to introduce a Digital Product Passport for a wide range of products. In the future, the Digital Product Pass could foster new market opportunities for business models that strengthen the circular economy. To do so, it must be designed in such a way that it is particularly empowering for actors in the fields of product life cycle extension.

The European Union is in the process of redefining the ecodesign criteria for products in several legislative proposals. Together with 37 European organisations and companies, Germanwatch publishes an open letter calling on legislators in the EU to make use of the historic chance by introducing the universal right to install any software on any device, including full access to hardware.

The energy transition requires a restructuring of the energy system and, as a result of decentralisation, also increasing digitalisation to integrate all actors and make them more flexible. However, digitalisation can be shaped and should happen under ecological and social premises. In this paper we present the challenges and evince possible solutions.

The following background paper explains how the blockchain technology works and shows the fields in which it might be applied as well as the opportunities blockchain might provide. Furthermore, it highlights the threats posed by blockchain and the areas in which the technology requires further development. Anyone aiming at making a significant political, economic or technological contribution to this future topic should start addressing blockchain now.

In our globalized world public policy making and society at large face challenges like climate change and financial crises that are global, shared worldwide and tightly connected with policies across different sectors. Solutions for addressing such highly interconnected challenges in a ‘system of systems’ world, tend to address only subsystems and so fail to achieve systemic change and anticipate impact and unintended consequences of public action. Pursuing the necessity of informing the policy decision process and proactively sensing possible problems concerning global matters we are proposing a novel computational platform called SYMPHONY that offers a solution for designing and testing policies and regulatory measures. Our aim is to offer policy modellers and policy makers tools that will support them to make decisions which will prevent and mitigate economic and financial crises as well as foster an economically and ecologically sustainable growth path.

The project SYMPHONY – where Germanwatch was a partner in - aimed at providing a set of innovative ICT tools, integrated in a platform designed to tackle two pressing issues: preventing and mitigating economic and financial crises; fostering an economically and ecologically sustainable growth path. The main objective of the project was to develop a framework for designing and testing policies and regulatory measures. This deliverable documents a concise conceptual architecture that addresses user requirements. Our solution specifies and defines how to orchestrate agent based macroeconomic models and simulators as well as stakeholder expectations in a gamified and engaging manner under a novel framework.

This paper analyses the current governance framework concerning mineral supply chains of electronic devices. This is about ten years after leading IT companies began in 2007 to fund research to investigate the impact of mineral sourcing for IT devices, which established a connection between their products and human rights abuses.