Green information systems & technologies – this generation and beyond: Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

Individuals, organizations, communities, and nations are all under pressures to determine how humans can survive as our environment continues to degrade. How we currently live, in both developed and emerging economies, consumes more resources than nature can provide. Howwe utilize these resources is also altering our environment in directions, that some fear, are irreversible. Global climate change; water, mineral, energy, and land resource scarcities; biodiversity decline; acid rain; hazardous and toxic substance poisoning; and many other environmental ills will influence how we live and survive in both the shortand long-term. These concerns require us to reconsider how we produce, consume, and use products, services, and technology. Sustainability requires considering both the needs of this generation and future generations. In this special issue we begin with setting this environmental sustainability foundation for the remainder of the papers by including a fundamental issues article by Rajendra Kumar Pachauri (2013), Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, the Nobel Peace Prize winning organization). Within organizations, businesses have encountered pressures to alter their institutional perspectives. New norms will require organizations and individuals to reevaluate activities and functions so that future generations can survive and, with hope, thrive. The sustainability of organizations and their greening will be necessary to help address environmental burdens, but it will not be easy. Green growth, the decoupling of economic growth from environmental burden and even providing a synergistic win-win relationship between economic growth and environmental improvement, is a nascent policy mantra (Vazquez-Brust and Sarkis 2012). Within commerce and the organization, greening supply chains, operations, strategy, human resources, marketing, and technology are all current efforts to help industry manage these environmental and social pressures. Some of these fields have been investigating these greening issues for decades and have developed a relatively mature research agenda. Information systems (IS) and Information Technology (IT) management have had sporadic developments and research investigation in greening and sustainability. The participation of IS and IT researchers and their voice in this literature has been lacking. Noting this gap, in the past few years, Green IS and IT have become more prominent practical concerns with concerted research effort (Jenkin et al. 2011). Green IS refers to improving the flow and management of information, while Green IT refers more to the hardware and other infrastructure that can be better managed and designed from an environmental perspective (Sarkis and Zhu 2008). Evidence of this greening prominence has included calls for research and investigation on this topic in the top IS and IT journals and by major IS and IT professional societies. Special