Claudia Ghisetti (Catholic University of Milan) (webinar)

“Do the two make a pair? Digital and green transition in European regions and their impact on greenhouse gas emissions”

This work discusses the implications of the digital and green (twin) transition in terms of its environmental impacts, starting from the acknowledgment that the green and digital transition may lead to competing environmental returns. We present a newly constructed unique and original dataset on digital and green scientific (publications) and technological (patents) knowledge and greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions for the period 2007-2017 in the European Union (EU28), Norway and Switzerland at the metro-regions level. After reviewing the existing literature on the innovation – emissions nexus and having unbundled the digital sphere through a natural language processing approach on publication and patent corpus, we propose a preliminary empirical analysis aimed at assessing the environmental impact of a sub-set of digital technologies. Can the digital and green transition go hand-in-hand to reduce aggregate greenhouse gas emissions or, conversely, will they lead to competing trends? The paper concludes with a discussion on the main limitations of the analysis and proposes directions for future research.