Public

Climate change is the defining development challenge of the 21st century: it magnifies and amplifies current poverty alleviation efforts. Climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies are increasingly becoming areas of priority on the radar of development practitioners. Timely access to and sharing of critical information will become even more important as the intensity, unpredictability and frequency of disasters is likely to increase due to climate change.

Despite the direct application of the current approaches to integrate ICTs as a strategic tool into development sectors (education, health, agriculture, governance, etc.), the status quo in the current development discourse indicates that there is an insufficient awareness and understanding among development stakeholders about the added value ICTs can contribute to climate change programmes. As indicated in Figure 4, there are three principal stages to achieve the integration of ICTs as a strategic tool in climate change programmes through awareness raising and capacity development.

It is worth highlighting one dimension within the ICT for development concept, namely that communication, voice and interactive media play an equally important role in parallel to access to information and knowledge. There is a need to “make sense” of the complexity surrounding climate change at the global level and the local level. By definition, communication is a participatory, two-way process, enabling the inclusion of all people in a critical dialogue to identify solutions and foster change.

The key message emerging from the conceptual and practical linkages between ICTs and climate change suggests that there are significant lessons to be learned from existing good practices of integrating ICTs as a strategic tool in development programmes. In other words, the ICT4D community is not “jumping on the climate change bandwagon”; rather, the existing and proven approaches in other development sectors can be directly applied within climate change programmes to render them more efficient and effective.¹⁵

Key linkages about ICTs and climate change

1) ICTs for mitigation

• Production and use of more energy- and CO2-efficient ICTs (see: www.climatesaverscomputing.org, and the promotion of less energy-consuming technology transfer to developing countries, thereby contributing to the decarbonisation of the economy. Role for development cooperation, regulators and private sector.

"Knowledge is like light. Weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere. Yet billions still live in the darkness of poverty- unnecessarily." (World Development Report 1999)

ICTs encompass the full range of technologies, including traditional and emerging devices such as community radio, television, mobile phones, computer and network hardware and software, the internet, satellite systems, and podcasting.

Figure 2: ICT for development: Range of technologies and relevance to users