Digitization and sustainability goals: Meeting on May 5 and 6

The United Nations has formulated 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to ensure global sustainable development at the economic, social and ecological levels. Digitization in particular poses new challenges for achieving the goals, but its transformational character can also open up new opportunities. However, possible conflicts and synergies between the SDGs in general and in particular with regard to digitalization have hardly been explored.

The conference will address this area of tension from a decisively normative perspective, aiming at the opportunities and challenges of sustainable digitality. A key topic will be which unquestioned assumptions are hidden in the SDGs and explicitly or implicitly convey certain ideas about the shapability or transformability of society. In his keynote address, Prof. Dr. Claus Leggewie, University of Giessen, will outline the topic of "Digitization and Sustainability - a Difficult Relationship."

Subsequently, three panels with presentations and commentaries will take an interdisciplinary look at the challenges, potentials and risks of the manifold relationships between sustainability and normative requirements of social coexistence. The potentials of sustainable digitality for intelligent dematerialization between production and consumption (Prof. Dr. Christa Liedtke, Wuppertal Institute), the legal innovation responsibility for sustainability of and through AI (Prof. Dr. Alexander Roßnagel, Hessian Commissioner for Data Protection and Data Security and University of Kassel), and design principles for information systems in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (Dr. Anne Ixmeier, LMU Munich) will be addressed.

The conference is open to the public. It is organized by the project group "Sustainable Intelligence - Intelligent Sustainability" of the Center for Responsible Digitalization (ZEVEDI). Responsible are its speaker, Prof. Dr. Gerrit Hornung, Professor of Public Law, IT Law and Environmental Law, and Prof. Dr. Jörn Lamla, Professor of Sociological Theory, both at the University of Kassel.

The conference program and schedule are available at https://www.uni-kassel.de/forschung/iteg/veranstaltungen/nachhaltige-digitalitaet. Advance registration is requested at iteg[at]uni-kassel[dot]de.

The University of Kassel has a research focus on sustainability and specifically on the United Nations SDGs. Currently, the Kassel Institute for Sustainability is being established in Kassel, which will focus on the SDGs.