Bibliography for Digital Sustainability
Education & Digitech
Greenwood, D. A., & Hougham, R. J. (2015). Mitigation and adaptation: Critical perspectives toward digital technologies in place-conscious environmental education. Policy futures in education, 13(1), 97-116.https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1478210314566732
Selwyn, N. (2022). Digital degrowth: toward radically sustainable education technology. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-14.
Selwyn, N. (2021). Ed-Tech Within Limits: Anticipating educational technology in times of environmental crisis. E-Learning and Digital Media, 18(5), 496-510.
Health & Dig tech
Electromagnetic pollution (electrosmog) in humans & flora & fauna
There are now thousands of articles exploring the above theme. The below are a cross-selection. The latest report from the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIP) suggests that there are no signs of adverse health effects in humans from new communications including 5G. This conclusion is contested in some literature. There is a growing body of evidence showing a correlation between electromagnetic pollution and adverse health reactions, in humans but also in flora and fauna. The effects on flora and fauna may be especially deleterious.
Bandara, P., & Carpenter, D. O. (2018). Planetary electromagnetic pollution: it is time to assess its impact. The Lancet Planetary Health, 2(12), e512-e514. https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2542-5196%2818%2930221-3
Bates, O., New, K., Mauriello, M. L., Bendor, R., Chopra, S., Clear, A. K., Mitchell-Finnigan, S., Remy, C., Mann, S. & Preist, C., 2 May 2019, CHI EA 2019 – Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 8 p. 3299017. (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – Proceedings).
Davis, D., Birnbaum, L., Ben-Ishai, P., Taylor, H., Sears, M., Butler, T., & Scarato, T. (2023). Wireless technologies, non-ionizing electromagnetic fields and children: Identifying and reducing health risks. Current Problems in Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care, 101374.
Deruelle, F. (2020). The different sources of electromagnetic fields: Dangers are not limited to physical health. Electromagnetic biology and medicine, 39(2), 166-175.
Simply put, electromagnetic fields are waves (or radiations) of different frequencies. The extra low frequencies (ELF) EMFs (3 Hz to 3 kHz) coming from electricity and the radiofrequencies (RF) EMFs (30 kHz to 300 GHz) coming from communication devices. Radiofrequencies consist of frequencies mainly used for radio and television, followed by microwave frequencies (higher than previous) used for wireless communications, base stations and satellites. (p.166)
Grigoriev, Y. G. Frequencies used in Telecommunications An Integrated Radiobiological Assessment:https://www.orsaa.org/uploads/6/7/7/9/67791943/frequencies_used_in_telecommunications__an_integrated_radiobiological_assessment_draft_v3.pdf
Ramakrishnan, M., & Athikary, K. G. (2023). Health effects of fifth-generation technologies. International Journal of Environmental Health Engineering (IJEHE), 2023(February). https://ijehe.mui.ac.ir/article_28759_09f7c5e7c1435a111f80c1d8a66c2998.pdf
Thielens, A., Bell, D., Mortimore, D. B., Greco, M. K., Martens, L., & Joseph, W. (2018). Exposure of insects to radio-frequency electromagnetic fields from 2 to 120 GHz. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 3924.
Digital tech and addiction
Sustainable Human Computer Interaction & Sustainable Interaction Design
Bremer, C. (2022). Efficiency Technology as a Political Act. Towards a Material Ethics of Computing. https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/171182/1/Bremer_Efficiency_Technology_as_a_Political_Act.pdf
Bremer, C., Knowles, B., & Friday, A. (2022, April). Have We Taken On Too Much?: A Critical Review of the Sustainable HCI Landscape. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-11).https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517609
Kiourtis, A., Mavrogiorgou, A., Zafeiropoulos, N., Mavrogiorgos, K., Karabetian, A., & Kyriazis, D. (2024, June). UI/UX Sustainable Design: Best Practices for Applications CO2 Emissions Reduction. In 2024 9th International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies (SpliTech) (pp. 01-06). IEEE. (behind pay wall)
Knowles, B., Widdicks, K., Blair, G., Berners-Lee, M., & Friday, A. (2022). Our house is on fire: The climate emergency and computing’s responsibility. Communications of the ACM, 65(6), 38-40. https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/162995/1/CACM_Viewpoints_7.pdf
‘We’ll most likely never do better than a best guess at computing’s carbon footprint, but given uncertainties it would be safer and more responsible to act on the assumption that higher estimates could be closer to the truth—especially since the pace of warming has exceeded our expectations at every point. But in big picture terms, the difference between 1.8% and 3.9% does not fundamentally change our mission: computing’s emissions need to reduce urgently and drastically. How are we going to achieve this?(np).
Preist, C., Schien, D., & Shabajee, P. (2019, May). Evaluating sustainable interaction design of digital services: The case of YouTube. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-12).
Preist, C., Schien, D., & Blevis, E. (2016, May). Understanding and mitigating the effects of device and cloud service design decisions on the environmental footprint of digital infrastructure. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1324-1337).
Schien, D., Shabajee, P., Wickenden, J., Picket, W., Roberts, G., & Preist, C. (2022, June). The DIMPACT Tool for Environmental Assessment of Digital Services. In ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS) (pp. 701-703).
Widdicks, K., Lucivero, F., Samuel, G., Croxatto, L. S., Smith, M. T., Ten Holter, C., … & Penzenstadler, B. (2023). Systems thinking and efficiency under emissions constraints: Addressing rebound effects in digital innovation and policy. Patterns, 4(2).
Ewaste
Zhang, X., Ciais, P., Jian, X., Liu, X., Wang, R., Chen, K., … & Ma, J. (2023). The carbon footprint response to projected base stations of China’s 5G mobile network. Science of The Total Environment, 870, 161906.
Other sources:
https://safetechinternational.org/the-oceania-radiofrequency-scientific-advisory-association-inc-orsaa/
https://emfscientist.org/
Water Use
Li, P., Yang, J., Islam, M. A., & Ren, S. (2023). Making AI Less” Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.03271. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271.pdf
GHG emissions (not linked to SHCI)
Lacoste, A., Luccioni, A., Schmidt, V., & Dandres, T. (2019). Quantifying the carbon emissions of machine learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.09700.