Charlie Wilson gave a public lecture exploring the links between digitalisation and climate change. Focusing on the ways in which digital goods and services are used in daily life – accelerated by lockdowns over the past year – Charlie showed how the impacts of digitalisation on carbon emissions can lead us to both climate utopia and climate […]
The EU’s Green Deal is a comprehensive plan for policy, research, innovation and investment to make Europe climate neutral by 2050. Reaching net zero emissions is also a key criterion for the EU’s €750 billion recovery package from Covid-19 recessions. To support progress of the Green Deal, the EU’s information services organisation ‘CORDIS’ produced a results pack from frontier research … including […]
Charlie Wilson gave a talk to the Oxford Energy Network on “How do new things spread? The diffusion of digital low-carbon innovations”. Charlie explored the many analogies between the underlying mechanisms of virus transmission – about which we’ve all sadly become armchair experts – and the underlying mechanisms of innovation diffusion. He then showed a range of new evidence from the SILCI project demonstrating the […]
Or at least that’s how a web tool translates “Energie sparen – das Potenzial ist gross” from Swiss German into English! Charlie Wilson was interviewed by the Swiss national radio and television station, SRF, about his research on energy demand reduction as an essential climate mitigation strategy that avoids the risky bet on future negative emission technologies. You can listen […]
The SILCI team have a new open access paper published in Annual Review of Environment and Resources. Here’s a taster in the form of a mock interview! What is your article about? Our article analyses a range of digital innovations available to consumers for providing alternative low-carbon forms of mobility, food buying, and domestic living. We […]
Charlie Wilson gave a virtual introductory keynote talk at the #REMforum conference on “System Change, not Climate Change” in Switzerland (while sitting in his kitchen, of course). The conference brought together stakeholders from finance, business, policy, and research to explore ways of accelerating renewables deployment and wider low-carbon transformation as we emerge from the pandemic. Charlie outlined a vision of a 1.5°C […]
Do digital consumer innovations help reduce carbon emissions? The SILCI team scoured the literature for studies that quantified impacts on activity, energy, or emissions as a result of using digital consumer innovations. They focused on 33 innovations across mobility, food, homes and energy domains – ranging from shared ride-hailing apps and digital farmers’ markets to smart home technologies and ‘demand response’ (domestic appliances temporarily powering down when […]
Charlie Wilson participated in a media briefing on reaching net-zero emissions organised by the Science Media Centre in London. The aim of the briefing was to emphasise the importance of the upcoming round of international climate negotiations (CoP26) to be hosted by the UK in Glasgow this November. CoP26 marks the critical five year follow-on to the […]
Charlie Wilson participated in an online conference hosted by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) as part of the Clean Energy Ministerial process launched alongside the Paris Climate Agreement. Due to take place in Berlin from March 25-27, the ‘International Forum on Long-Term Energy Scenarios’ was hastily converted to a virtual format – one of many […]
Charlie Wilson co-authored a chapter in the latest UNEP report on where we are likely to be in the future compared to where we need to be in order to meet Paris Agreement targets. These authoritative assessments of what has become known as the ’emissions gap’ are an annual report card issued to the international community. This latest one […]