Program on
Information Technology
as Agent of Change
in Environmental Policy
Program Overview:
New information technologies are creating disruptive change in existing political, economic and social arrangements and structures, and providing new opportunities to better manage existing and emerging complexities.
As these transformative technologies enable advanced industrial societies to evolve into information societies, globalization, industrialization, global population growth, immigration flows, and other pressures have severely strained natural resource consumption and further stressed the natural environment.
Many consumption and environmental problems, and their potential solutions, are impacted by the use of information technologies. Technological solutions can lower transaction costs and improve information flows, as well as discover and help manage complex interrelated environmental causes and effects.
The GISP Program on Information Technology as Agent of Change in Environmental Policy is focused on exploring how information technology creates opportunities for new regulatory approaches and structures to manage natural resource consumption and environmental impacts by changing certain initial conditions, in the main, lowering transaction and information costs and improving analytical and monitoring capabilities.
Kim Taipale, founder and executive director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy and a senior fellow and director of the Global Information Society Project at the World Policy Institute serves as Program Director. [bio]
Links:
The Global Information Society Project Web Site
[www.global-info-society.org]
World Policy Institute (WPI)
[www.worldpolicy.org]
GISP Page on WPI Web Site
[www.worldpolicy.org/projects/gisp/]
Center for Advanced Studies in Science & Technology Policy
[www.advancedstudies.org]
Shell Center for Sustainability of Rice University
[www.ruf.rice.edu/~eesi/scs/]
Rocky Mountain Institute
[www.rmi.org]