Contributions published at Informatics and Sustainability Research (Lorenz Hilty)

Throughout Western societies, a growing share of citizens buy fair trade coffee, boycott certain food companies, or become vegan. These are just a few examples of the many innovative ways where citizens use their role as consumers to challenge current social, institutional, and market practices. For them, the market has become a political arena where they vote with their dollar.

The objective of this bachelor thesis is to describe the development of an electronic B2B marketplace in Europe and to define its requirements on the part of the various users. First, an analysis of an existing electronic marketplace is presented with focus on the success factors of this very marketplace. In addition to the results of interviews with potential users of the marketplace a description of functions offer substantial added value to all parties in a procurement relationship. The development of an electronic marketplace in Europe also increases the digital visibility of European production sites, which in turn benefits individual companies as well as the European workplace as a whole. The influence of directories on the digital visibility of companies described by Hauck et al. (2020) confirms this positive effect. This bachelor thesis is relevant for readers who want to understand how an electronic marketplace works. It also serves as a helpful guide for people who want to develop an electronic marketplace for Europe in defining its requirements and success factors.

Poverty and hunger still prevails in many parts of the world. Sub-Saharan countries are particularly affected by severe food insecurity due to heavy reliance on agriculture and lack of sufficient farming equipment. Thus, finding a cost-effective method to introduce improved equipment to a high percentage of farmers in reasonable time is crucial. For this reason, we develop a modular agent-based model which simulates innovation diffusion among smallholder farmer households in Tanzania. It is based on proven innovation research as well as recent findings in an ongoing field study of the University of Zurich in Tanzania. Furthermore, we define different intervention strategies to accelerate the diffusion rate of an innovation among farmers. We outline how our model can be utilized to evaluate and compare such strategies in various ways. By applying algorithms from machine-learning on our diffusion simulation results, we show how key factors behind the performance of a strategy can be determined and demonstrate possibilities to predict the success rate of a strategy. Our findings present researchers an inexpensive alternative to assess intervention strategies effectiveness before launching them in the field.

The energy demand of data centers has been steadily increasing over the years through increased usage of digital services. This thesis aims to elicitate information about the energy demand of the storage systems operated at UZH and moreover provides an estimate concerning the energy demand of a purely online-based university course. Theoretical background about the workings of a data center and the effect of COVID-19 on the educational environment are summarized in addition to proposed calculation models that determine the energy demand and emissions of storage systems at UZH and online lectures. The data gathered from the interviews with employees of UZH serves as the basis of the calculation model, while two video conferencing systems in use for online lectures were considered. In addition to the video conferencing systems, the case of online learnings' energy demand through prerecorded lectures has been estimated. The emission results indicate that the applied calculation model for the storage systems are viable, as they are within the range of the emissions that have been reported in the sustainability report 2020 of UZH. Organizational and technical measures to reduce the energy demand of the storage systems are furthermore proposed. The estimations for the online learning scenarios suggest that online learning may be an appropriate measure to reduce emissions caused by UZH. The quality of teaching and social aspects may in turn experience a negative effect.

The growing human population and its consumption patterns have brought the environment to its limits. The environmental awareness has to be increased and the caused environmental impacts must be urgently decreased to prevent further damage. Existing life cycle assessment (LCA) methods have been studied in depth by various researchers to identify the points with the greatest potential for improvement. By illustrating the environmental impacts caused by human consumption and production the environmental awareness can be raised. This thesis investigates the economic input-output life cycle assessment (EIO-LCA) method and reveals that the most important factors for beneficial estimations of environmental impacts are strongly coupled with the data that is used to create EIO-LCA model. Furthermore, this thesis presents a web application which delivers estimations for environmental impacts caused by the increasing demand of products from sectors in the Swiss economy. The provided estimations can support purchasing decisions and at the same time increase the environmental awareness of users by displaying the approximate environmental impacts.

The proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased sharply since the beginning of industrialization. This has led to more heat storage and an increase in the earth's surface temperature. Many companies are committing themselves to a CO2-neutral production. A first step for companies is to determine their own CO2-footprint, after which the emissions can be compensated or reduced. There are numerous options for determining the company's carbon footprint. One of them is an online footprint calculator. In this thesis, such a calculator is developed for Swiss small and medium sized (service) companies based on three questions. First, it is asked how a web application to estimate the carbon footprint for SMEs in the Swiss service sector should look like. Secondly, the relevant factors from the GHG protocol are identified. Thirdly, it is asked how a simplified estimation can be created based on the GHG protocol and how to make it as user-friendly as possible. To answer the research questions, a literature review and an examination of existing footprint calculators were conducted. This showed that there is room for improvement in transparency and usability. More background information would lead to more understanding and thus more transparency. Based on this, the web application is built with special attention to delivering understandable and helpful background information. The web application is limited to recording emissions from the categories travelling, commuting and office. Other categories are not included due to user-friendliness and limited data.

The use of digital products and services has continued to increase, especially in recent years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in both work and private life. For example, people are using video conferencing systems and cloud services more than ever to work from home, ordering more and more products online, and accessing an inexhaustible selection of videos and music titles through streaming platforms. As the use of digital products and services leads to profound changes in working and private life, the question arises to what extent these contribute to a reduction or increase in the emission rate of greenhouse gases and are thus rather an opportunity or a hurdle for the achievement of climate protection goals. Research to date shows that a differentiated approach is necessary here and that blanket estimates of the climate impact of digitalization are not helpful.

Information and communication technology (ICT) provides unprecedented opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from passenger transport by avoiding, shifting or improving transport. Research on climate protection through ICT applications in passenger transport mainly focuses on theoretical potentials, is assuming that digital mobility services replace GHG-intensive transport modes (e.g. car travel), and does not specify the conditions under which decarbonization potentials will materialize. It is known that digital mobility services can also take a complementary (as opposed to substituting) role in travel or replace non-motorized travel, which can increase GHG emissions. Based on existing literature, we develop a conceptual framework to guide qualitative and quantitative assessments of the relationship between ICT use, passenger transport and GHG emissions. The framework distinguishes three types of effects: (1) First-order effects, GHG impacts of producing, operating and disposing the ICT hardware and software, (2) second-order effects, impacts of ICT on properties of transport modes, transport mode choice and travel demand, and (3) third-order effects, long-term structural changes due to ICT use (e.g. residential relocation). We qualitatively demonstrate the framework at the example of automated driving and discuss methodological challenges in assessments of ICT impacts on passenger transport such as the definition of system boundaries, consideration of socio-demographic characteristics of individuals and the inference of causality. The framework supports researchers in scoping assessments, designing suitable assessment methods and correctly interpreting the results, which is essential to put digitalization in passenger transport at the service of climate protection.

This bachelor thesis examines which intrusion detection system (IDS) is best suited for use in industrial control systems and to what extent an IDS must be structured to meet the requirements of industrial control systems. To answer the research question about the appropriate IDS, a qualitative analysis was conducted based on the evaluation criteria of existing studies in the industrial environment. To answer the second research question, a theoretical concept of a reactive IDS was developed that focused on integration into existing control systems. The qualitative analysis showed that hybrid IDS meet the majority of the control systems' requirements. However, significant shortcomings could be identified in the other IDS types, which argue against their use in industrial environments. The development of the concept of a reactive IDS represents that the use of multiple interconnected security modules can enable early detection and elimination of system-relevant threats. In addition, the modular design provides simplified handling for system configuration and the reactive approach reduces the need for human intervention. Limitations of the concept include high resource consumption and insufficient detection of novel attacks.

Bees collect pollen from a variety of plant species. This pollen diversity is both an indicator of biodiversity and a balanced diet for bees which has a positive effect on their health. Traditionally, pollen diversity is determined by invasively and manually collecting and analysing the pollen. In this paper, we present a heuristic for assessing the pollen diversity around a hive using data on flora. This data-driven approach is both efficient and non-invasive. We evaluated our approach against the results of a microscope analysis, showing that it delivers useable results, despite the lack of flora data in some places. As a next step, we will incorporate data from our AI-based video monitoring system of hives to match plants based on pollen colours that were detected in the images.

One of the aims of serious role-playing games (SRPG) is to educate people by simulating the impact of their actions in various domains. Climate change is one of these domains. Such SRPGs are usually based on complex simulations of heterogeneous models. However, interfacing a SRPG with heterogeneous simulations is currently a manual and fault-prone process that requires both domain-specific and technical knowledge. This research proposes a conceptual framework that supports game designers in interfacing their SRPGs with pre-existing or custom-tailored simulation models. In addition, a first implementation of such an interface is presented that further facilitates the creation, configuration and execution of such games.

Digital platforms promote the shared consumption of a variety of material and immaterial goods. As they grow and appeal to more consumers, the new practices and patterns of sharing can have both desirable and undesirable impacts from a sustainability point of view. The present paper takes a closer look at the various impacts of shared consumption practiced in the digital sharing economy (DSE) with the aim to propose a guideline for assessing the DSE’s sustainability impacts. The guideline builds on a typology of shareable goods and a classification of different positive and negative environmental impacts of sharing. By considering different consumption scenarios (based on consumers’ behavioral responses, where applicable), the study develops a conceptual framework for the DSE’s impacts on the environment. This is also an extension of the general impact categories of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) which already exist in the literature. In addition to the impact of consumption, the concepts of the “impact of provision,” “impact of access,” and “impact of maintenance” are introduced as the four main evaluations comprising the sustainability assessment of sharing platforms. The considerations addressed can be helpful in delineating further evaluations of the sustainability of various instances of digital sharing systems.

"Blackout" is a novel by Marc Elsberg. It is about a Europe-wide blackout caused by a hacker attack on the power grid. The book impressively illustrates the consequences of a prolonged blackout, some of which are unimaginable for people who are not familiar with the topic. With the success of the fictional book Blackout, the topic of the vulnerability of the power grid and its consequences for society and the environment were brought to a wider audience. This paper validates the attack on the power grid from a technical perspective and discusses whether a similar attack could in fact lead to a Europe-wide blackout of the magnitude described. We distinguish between two types of effects that occur when the grid is attacked, immediate effects and consequences. If an attacker remotely cuts off the power of several households by hacking their smart meters, the immediate effect is that the hacked households no longer have power. A consequence is the instability of the power grid that may follow the immediate effect due to the fact that the generation and consumption of power are not in line anymore. Consequences form chains of effects which can be described by the metaphor of "domino effect". A blackout can reach out to places where nothing was attacked because the power grid as a whole collapses, which causes other infrastructures such as the telecommunications system, the traffic system and food supply chains to collapse. This paper mainly focuses on the validation of the immediate effects described in "Blackout".

Honeybees are one of the most important pollinators in our world and are therefore vital to biodiversity and economy. Over the past decades, bee populations have been dwindling. Although the causes are known, the exact impact of each cause is still unclear. The BeeLivingSensor project aims to shed light on this intricate question by aggregating data around bees in an automated, non-invasive fashion. The goal of this thesis was to integrate two pollen metrics into our web-based platform that serve as an indicator for biodiversity and bee health: the number of pollen and the floral diversity of the pollen. For the first metric, we constructed a fully scalable end-to-end system for tracking pollen using existing computer vision solutions. For the second metric, we developed an algorithm for matching plants that bloom in a certain area at a given time. We evaluated both metrics in terms of accuracy, showing that the pollen counting mechanism needs improvement, whereas the plant-matching already delivers usable results. We also measured the speed for computing the pollen counts, demonstrating that we can process the daily amount of data of two hives on a strong GPU machine.

The increasing threat of environmental problems urges for solutions. At the same time, several ethical concerns about the misuse of technology, such as privacy violations or manipulation, have emerged. Even though there is a substantial amount of research regarding persuasive technology (PT), this work aims to find potential use cases of PT to address environmental problems. This work states that persuasive systems for sustainability (PSS) can address environmental problems in an ethical fashion by revealing the many unused potentials of ethical design for PSS. The review of theoretical and practical literature results in a broad set of ethical design requirements for PSS design. instead of only providing further constraints to the already quite difficult area of PSS, this works also reveals the unused potential of PSS by applying ethical requirements to well-known practical PT design principles and strategies.

Estimating biodiversity of a local environment can help us decrease the rate of its degradation. The Beelivingsensor project aims to utilize honey bees as living sensors that could help us estimate biodiversity. However, in order to analyze the honey bees, and therefore, extract the valuable information, we need to process a lot of data. This need is fulfilled by the Beelivingsensor platform, as it accepts data from multiple sources, and processes them to provide us with useful information. Our thesis aims to improve the maintainability, robustness, and extensibility of this platform. Our hope is that we will help developers focus on improving the platform, rather than making sure it is operational. Moreover, we want to make sure that in case no experienced developers are available, and our platform encounters errors that could endanger its functionality, the platform will stay operational, and fixing any problems will be as easy as possible. As a result of our research, we were able to identify five common problems affecting cloud platforms according to the literature. We have then used this knowledge to improve the maintainability of our platform in eight key areas. Additionally, by conducting two experiments, we were able to objectively prove that outside of our own positive experience, these improvements are indeed beneficial. During the experiments, we have also noted a few unexpected observations, which could be further explored in the future research. In the end, we have helped the platform to stay operational for longer periods of time, and we have decreased the amount of attention it needs from its administrators. The research can also help other Kubernetes platform maintainers to reconsider the tools they should prioritize, and they might be able to avoid some pitfalls that we have discovered during our experiments.

Increasing the service lifetime of mobile Internet-enabled devices (MIEDs) such as smartphones, tablets and laptops is a promising strategy to reduce the number of devices that need to be produced and reduce environmental impacts associated with device production. A broad spectrum of lifetime-extending measures has been explored in literature and in industry practice. In this article, we present an overview of explored measures, discuss challenges in their implementation and environmental impacts of lifetime extension. We find that measures can be distinguished into measures aiming at (1) the improvement of the device design (e.g. modular or durable design of smartphones), (2) device retention (increasing the time a user keeps a device, e.g. by offering repair services or fostering emotional attachment to devices), and (3) recirculation (creating a second life with a different user and/or in a different context, e.g. by refurbishing and reselling devices). The implementation of measures is challenged by trade-offs faced by organizations in the MIED value chain, which specifically occur when revenues depend on the number of new devices produced and sold. Furthermore, measures are subject to rebound and induction effects (e.g. imperfect substitution, re-spending effects), which can compensate for the (theoretical) environmental gains from service lifetime extension. In particular, it is uncertain to what extent a measure actually leads to lifetime extension and eventually reduces primary production of devices (displacement rate). Thus, more systematic research is needed on the feasibility of measures and the conditions under which they effectively contribute to a net reduction of environmental impacts.

Digital platforms have enabled huge efficiency in coordinating sharing practices among a large number of users. The proliferation of sharing platforms has formed a phenomenon often referred to – albeit not unanimously – as ‘the sharing economy’ or, more precisely, ‘the Digital Sharing Economy (DSE)’1. What makes the DSE special is its ability to enhance access to a wide variety of material and immaterial resources within large and spatially distributed communities of consumers; a feature that could not exist in traditional, small-scale sharing. This characteristic has been known as the enabling role of digital Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in transforming sharing practices and scaling up sharing networks. Such extensive changes brought by digital advancements can raise a number of important questions concerning sustainability (Salomon and Mokhtarian, 2008), as changes often come along with both opportunities and risks. From a sustainability perspective, an evident impact of sharing resources is improved efficiency in consumption. Through sharing, the utilization of a resource increases to serve more demand, which translates to an optimization effect. Nevertheless, it is possible that increased efficiency is followed by unwanted impacts such as rebound effects. Therefore, to develop a critical perspective, efforts should be directed towards understanding and analyzing both the potential positive and negative impacts of the shared consumption promoted by digital platforms. Such analysis can be based on two major parts: First, identifying the type of the resource that is shared; second, investigating how sharing that resource can affect the sustainability of its consumption and other consumption patterns that it may promote.

Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie (IKT) verursacht direkt, jedoch auch indirekt Umwelteffekte. Die direkten Effekte entstehen durch den Energie- und Ressourcenverbrauch entlang des Lebenszyklus von IKT-Hardware (Produktion, Betrieb und Entsorgung) und werden meist mit Lebenszyklusanalysen bestimmt. Indirekte Effekte sind Umweltauswirkungen, welche sich aus der Anwendung von IKT ergeben, beispielsweise durch veränderte Produktions- oder Konsummuster. Da IKT immer mehr Bereiche des Alltags durchdringt und durch verschiedenste Mechanismen sowohl positive wie auch negative Umweltauswirkungen herbeiführt, ist die Bestimmung indirekter Umweltauswirkungen konzeptuell herausfordernd. In diesem Artikel besprechen wir indirekte Umweltauswirkungen von IKT auf drei Ebenen: Auswirkungen einzelner Anwendungsfälle, Sektor-übergreifende Effekte und systemische Effekte. Wir zeigen, wie einzelne Telekommunikationsfirmen und Industrieverbände positive indirekte Auswirkungen von IKT postulieren und unterziehen diese Studien einer kritischen Betrachtung. Wir extrahieren daraufhin die inhärenten methodischen Schwierigkeiten derartiger Studien und zeigen anhand zweier Beispiele, wie IKT gleichzeitig sowohl positive als auch negative Umweltauswirkungen hervorrufen kann. Den Herausforderungen in deren Beurteilung bewusst, jedoch auch die prinzipiellen Wirkungsmechanismen indirekter Umweltauswirkungen von IKT verstehend, plädieren wir letztlich dafür, durch wirtschaftspolitische Maßnahmen Potenziale für den Umweltschutz durch IKT zu erschließen, auch wenn die genauen Effekte noch nicht in Zahlen erfasst werden können. = Information and communication technology (ICT) causes direct and indirect environmental effects. The direct effects arise from the energy and resource consumption along the life cycle of ICT hardware (production, operation, and disposal) and are usually determined with life cycle assessments. Indirect effects are environmental impacts that result from the use of ICT, for example through changes in production or consumption patterns. As ICT penetrates more and more areas of everyday life and causes diverse positive and negative types of environmental impacts, the assessment of indirect environmental impacts is conceptually challenging. In this article, we discuss indirect environmental impacts of ICT on three levels: impact of individual ICT use cases, cross-sectoral effects, and systemic effects of ICT use. We show and critically discuss how telecommunication companies and industry associations postulate positive indirect effects of ICT. Based on these insights, we extract the inherent methodological difficulties of such studies and use two examples to show how ICT can have both positive and negative environmental impacts at the same time. Aware of the challenges in their assessment, but also understanding the mechanisms leading to their indirect environmental effects, we advocate to exploit the potential for environmental protection through ICT through policy measures, even if the exact magnitude of the effects cannot be yet assessed.

The challenges posed to humanity by climate change require innovative approaches. Well-designed games are powerful tools with the potential to support solving climate related challenges. In this article, we present a mapping review study of games that address climate change issues (climate games). In a search and selection process, we identified 115 climate games that were classified by applying a newly developed game typology. This allowed gaining an overview of existing climate games and identifying potentials for future game development. The game classification revealed that the majority of climate games (75%) were designed for learning purposes and addressed heterogeneous target audiences such as students, professionals, or the “general public”. The identified games covered a wide range of characteristics, e.g., regarding the topic addressed, player interaction, game-play, level of abstraction, or the media used for play. Nevertheless, we identified areas where only few or no games were found. These “gaps” provide opportunities where future games could help solving climate challenges and include, amongst others, games designed for professionals to address specific needs and games that create a direct impact outside the game environment. Regarding game design, experimenting with the abstraction of games is currently underexplored and offers potential for future developments.