Podcast: New frontiers in technology

 

HC: Welcome to Currents in sustainability 2025. In this episode, we will discuss emerging technologies and in relation to sustainable development and climate change. My name is Henrik Carlsen. I’m a senior research fellow at Stockholm Environment Institute headquarters in Stockholm.

To my help I have a panel with three distinguished researchers on this topic that will help me to dig a little bit deeper into this topic of today. First we have our external guest Kelly Levin. She’s the Chief of Science, Data, and Systems Change at the Bezos Earth Fund. She also co-directs the System Change Lab, which is a platform for tracking key transformations in the direction of sustainable development.

Next, we have Miquel Muñoz Cabré of SEI’s US office. Miquel’s research focus on energy transition in relation to climate change, especially with regards to green finance, policy analysis, and socioeconomic aspects of technological development.

Last but certainly not least, we have my colleague Somya Joshi, also from SEI headquarters in Stockholm. Somya’s research focuses on technological innovation in relation to sustainable development. A particular focus of Somya’s research is around accountability and governance of technological development.

So let me try to just say a few words about technology in relation to sustainable development and climate change. During the last couple of years, there has been a rise in interest in technology more broadly in relation to sustainability. Before that, there was a very clear focus on technologies for transforming our energy system. But clearly that is not enough. Technology has a much broader implication of different aspects of society of relevance for sustainability.

In the last couple of years, people have broadened up the discussion of the role of technology in social development in general, and then try to link that to sustainable development, not only focusing on single sector technology transitions.

In recent years, we also have seen more of a global competition for technological development. I think it’s fair to say that for the first time since 1957, when the Soviet Union sent out the Sputnik, there are fears now growing in especially the Western countries that another country outside the Western hemisphere will take the lead in the key technology of huge importance for innovation broadly. And I’m of course talking about China and artificial intelligence.

So this raises also questions about access to technology. Who will get access to the technology that we need in order to transform from a non-sustainable pathway to sustainable pathway? Will this become even further divided between the Global North and the Global South? Or could we imagine scenarios where we see more of co-development of technology between the Global North and Global South? Furthermore, could we imagine scenarios where technologies are developed open source and transparent to everyone to use?

Those are questions and things and topics that we will come back to in the panel discussion. I will now hand over to the panel, and my first question is a little bit more personal and pertains to the work that you are doing yourself. You’re all working on different aspects of technological development in relation to sustainable development. But on a slightly deeper level, what does technology mean to you in your daily work? Can you give an example, just one or perhaps two examples, on the role of technology in the work that you are doing right now?

Kelly, would you like to go first, please?

KL: Thanks, Henrik. It’s great to be here. I guess when I think about technology, I work on climate change and nature solutions. And when I think about technology, I think about the problem and I think about the solution. So, when you think about the rise of emissions since the industrial revolution, you can think about how technology has caused this buildup of emissions and are chewing through a carbon budget so fast that we’ve been seeing incredibly dangerous climate impacts across the globe.

And then I also think about the fact that technology is full of solutions and to get to safe levels of warming, we need to change the way that we transport ourselves and build our cities and grow our food. And that is going to require significant technological advancements at all different scales when you think about the technologies that we already have on hand and the fact that we need to scale them incredibly quickly. And then also we’re going to require new technologies in some sectors as well.

HC: Thank you, Kelly, for this initial reflection. Miquel, do you want to go second?

MMC: Thanks Henrik and it’s a pleasure being here. What is technology?

I think a very holistic take on technology. To me, it’s like the collections of artifacts and knowledge that we used to interact in the environment, right? And with other people. So from that perspective, that includes processes and other stuff.

Maybe I’ll give you an example of technology problems and technology solutions. And I really like Kelly’s approach to solutions, right? But for instance, we’re working in with Indigenous communities in Colombia and La Guajira, and these are Indigenous communities affected by wind power turbines. And here we have a new technology that wasn’t there: large wind turbines that help with energy transition and new impacts that were not there because those turbines didn’t exist. One of the things that we do with these communities is we provide them with information about the parks. And to do so, we use yet another technology, we create an app that they can look in their phone where they can get all the information they need on these projects that they did not have access to before. And we use satellite imagery and machine learning to identify features from the terrain and how, like, for instance, the dugouts, and how they interact with those wind farms, and provide all this information to make it accessible to the communities.

HC: Thanks Miquel. So Somya, what does that technology mean to you on a deeper level?

SJ: Thanks Henrik.

For me, technology is a very double-edged sword. I grew up in a tiny village in the north of India, near Nepal, where the village saw helicopters before it saw roads and it saw traffic.

To me, technology sometimes has the ability to leap over time and at other times, it has the ability to hold back, and that’s my current work and research looking at both the amazing opportunities that something like artificial intelligence offers us in terms of data insights (enabling communities in low resource settings), but at the same time, being quite critical and asking, what are some of the more pertinent questions we’re not asking here?

HC: Thank you, Somya. I just want to have a follow-up question to all of you. Because I have this feeling that if a problem is created by technology, like emission of greenhouse gases, for example, it’s certainly created by technology and humans, of course. It seems to me that when we see a problem created by technology, we tend to come up with a new technology trying to solve that problem. And that technology creates yet another problem. And then we come up with yet another technology to solve that problem. So we build this layered structure of new technologies all the time. Instead, I think, at least in Western thinking, instead of asking more fundamental questions, could we solve this in a non-technological way? For example, via social change or behavioral change or anything like that. So is this something you have thought about in your work?

KL: I think it’s an incredibly important question, and it probably depends on what aspect of the problem you’re talking about in terms of the prospects for societal change. Often that’s the kind of the stickiest when norms change and behavior changes but sometimes it’s incredibly difficult in an uphill battle.

I’ll give you an example of something that we’re working on at the Bezos Earth Fund, which is around cattle. Cows you might know are the second most polluting species on earth after humans in terms of methane emissions as well as land use change associated with cattle. And when you think about the problem with rising meat demand, especially as our populations grow and certainly there are some areas of the world that are not consuming enough protein, but certainly a lot that are over consuming protein, especially beef and dairy. And then the question is, what do you do about this issue?

And I think you really need a three-pronged approach. One is going to be around making cows better, right? And that might be around vaccines and feed that reduces methane emissions and that will take technological advancements. One might be around societal change and behavioral change and shifting towards plant-based diets. And we’ve also seen the limits of that. It’s challenging to get people to change their diets. It’s not that we don’t need to continue to try to do everything to do that in overconsuming areas, but one technological advancement that’s incredibly interesting is around alternative proteins, which basically is giving the same kind of taste and feel eventually, we hope, as technology advances to compete with conventional meat and can be tailored to markets with high projected growth and demand where there’s a combination of approaches, than where you’re looking at substitutes for the beef that is wreaking havoc around the world and shifting diets and making cows better, so to speak.

So often I think it probably depends a lot on the problem at hand and how challenging it is to shift behavior. Because we need to do it really fast, right? So you might need a multi-pronged approach.

HC: Thank you, Kelly, for those reflections. Miquel, Somya, do you want to go on this?

SJ: I can jump in there. I really liked the point you raised about using certain technologies to solve other technology problems. And with AI in particular, we see that where a lot of real estate is given to the more existential challenges that AI may or may not pose, whereas we don’t look at the real everyday challenges, the low hanging fruits in terms of energy, water, emission footprints that we can solve today and now. Rather, we are fixating on the more long-term problems.

MMC: Maybe a word of caution on societal change. I like the example that Kelly gave, it’s great. And what it shows in part is that we do need to complement this technological change. And if we do wait for societal change, we may miss the boat on meaningful action on climate change, and we cannot wait for people not to fly, or we cannot wait for people or for structures to be set up, so we do not need internal combustion engines for things to happen. So I would just caution on not putting too much weight on societal change alone. If it worked, it would be great, but we have a long history of humans to show the country. Thanks.

HC: Thanks, Miquel. This brings me actually in another direction. I think that sometimes the fossil fuel economy is called a technological lock-in, that we are locked into a certain technological regime with regards to our energy system. When it comes to geoengineering, we have seen discussions about similar things, that certain geoengineering solutions could also be in the direction of locking in our society in certain regimes that we can’t really get out of. But I hear not too many other discussions about others, potential lock-ins that we can end up in with regards to emerging technologies that will put us in another dangerous corner, not the fossil fuel corner, but another dangerous corner, which will create yet another lock-in. Is this something you have thought about in your research?

MMC: Well, I promise I did not plant this question because we have this program that’s called the Carbon Lock-in here at SEI where we’ve been looking exactly at these kind of questions on fossil fuels, as you said. I am concerned about how some of these technologies are locking us in in a corporate-dominated world because of the current paradigm.

So if you talk about AI, artificial intelligence, if you talk about electric vehicles, electric mobility, even if you talk storage, uh, electricity storage, batteries or supply chains, most of them have the potential of locking us in in a corporate- or conglomerate- dominated world with a significant threat to democratic principles.

So I think that’s a concern I have regarding the solutions to the problem, the technological solutions. Thank you.

HC: Thank you Miquel. Kelly, do you have any thoughts about this?

KL: Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve seen time and again with technological advances, the kind of suboptimal technology getting locked in. And I think we just need to be incredibly careful to think through first what it actually takes to scale something. And then what could be the unintended consequences? I know that the community is certainly waking up to this in the context of carbon removal, for example.

We have in the history of human innovation, rarely scaled anything to the gigatons scale. For something like greenhouse gas removal, we’re talking about getting to 10 gigatons by mid-century, which is in addition to reducing emissions as fast as possible. And what it takes to actually get to gigatons scale, we do need to think a lot about, you know, potential, harms to ecosystems. Some of the novel approaches, for example, in ocean carbon removal I think need to take great care and monitoring and reporting and verification before they’re deployed at scale because these are incredibly novel, right? Some of the natural processes that we’re starting to try to speed up with technological advances that we’ve never done before in human history.

And similarly, just to make sure that we’re looking at harms to communities where they’re being deployed. So I think once something is locked in, obviously the costs of reversal are incredibly hard. So we also need to have brave decision makers who are ready to ditch attempts that are not going to get us to our goals, which are few and far between often.

SJ: When we talk about lock-ins, one of the things that amazed me was that the LLM (large language model) world captured everyone’s imagination. And there is a sort of lock-in effect there, because if the science is showing us that the real developments or revolutionary pushes are happening elsewhere, but in the LLM side of things is what can be monetized in the short term. And that’s one form of lock-in. The other form of lock-in can also be something that Miquel, hinted at, which is the extractive narratives when it comes to also critical minerals. We have to think about as the demand is exceeding the supply of these very, very rare earth and critical minerals, how do we respond to that?

HC: Thank you Somya. So let’s move over to perhaps a more positive note. I don’t know, let’s see. In those episodes, we’re trying to look one year into the future, what will happen this year. So instead of asking you for potential technological breakthroughs, perhaps I can ask you about technological progress. Do you see any signals or do you have any specific hopes of real technological progress this year in relation to sustainable development? What makes you optimists?

KL: I suppose one thing that makes me optimistic is potential AI applications to sustainable development. I think it remains to be seen what will come this year, but certainly in the coming years, when you think about people are already using AI, for example, to monitor greenhouse gas emissions and advanced modeling and detect methane leaks. But there is the potential to do so much more and faster. And we, for example, at the Bezos Earth Fund, have looked at how modern AI could be applied to some of the areas that we’re working on.

So for example, when I talked about alternative proteins, there are millions of protein combinations that could be used to produce meat alternatives that are both delicious and nutritious and potentially more affordable with a much smaller environmental footprint. But what is that right combination? And can AI help find formulations or processing approaches that could advance a new generation of proteins is one question that we’re asking.

And similarly, you could think about applications to biodiversity conservation, where AI can help us discover new species that humans have never discovered, or in terms of grid systems, help us expand energy access potentially to hundreds of millions of people. And we don’t want to be Pollyannish, but I think we need to challenge ourselves to think about how can AI be used and harnessed to accelerate for solutions. And that’s an area that I’m incredibly excited about and will be watching.

HC: Just a quick follow up question to you, Kelly, on that note. There is so much discussion about AI and energy use, that AI systems will consume an enormous amount of energy. So what’s your take on that one?

KL: No, it’s certainly something that we need to watch incredibly carefully. I think both the question of can we do this in a way that doesn’t consume as much energy and then how to make sure that we are thinking about increasing the supply of renewable energy, clean sources of energy as quickly as possible. But also to meet human needs in other domains as well. But this is obviously something that we need to keep our eye on and it’s going to be a topic that many are going to be focusing on in the coming years.

HC: Yes. Thank you Kelly. Miquel, what makes you an optimist regarding technology in 2025?

MMC: Thanks Henrik. Maybe first I’ll jump back on the energy consumption of AI. And I think if we look at historical trends from humanity, I think we just have to make our peace with that. We are going to consume more energy. That’s the human trend since the prehistory. And higher quality energy as well, which means electricity at this moment. So the trick here is how are we going to do that in a decarbonized way if we want to keep climate change under control? And I think that’s the real question not trying to pretend we’re going to consume less because I think that’s not a winning proposition.

But what makes me optimist? I don’t know if optimist is the word, but something that I’m looking for, I’m looking forward to see what’s going to happen this year is in the realm of autonomous mobility. And particular electric vehicles. And I think there’s a confluence now of ingredients. So we have on one way, we have a rapid development of technology, both for electric vehicles, for storage. Also for the AI component of electric driving. On another hand, we have the geopolitical situation where we have the protectionist cold war going up. And as you say, we’re in a splitting moment, which I would say it applies even more to electric mobility than it does to AI. And on the other one, we have a new administration coming up in the US where we may expect a heavy deregulation, which may allow for rapid – for good or bad – implementation of different models of autonomous mobility.

So I think a year from now, we may be looking at a changed landscape in that we may not. I may be completely wrong, but that’s something I’m interested in seeing what happens because that may be one place where the competition between the two or more blocks that you were describing plays out.

HC: Thanks, Miquel. Somya, do you have any optimistic signs around the corner?

SJ: Funny enough, there is something that makes me very optimistic and that’s the work on Frugal AI. This is sort of challenging the narrative of bigger is better always, both in terms of how larger data sets used in training or how the algorithms themselves are designed. And there’s a lot of innovation being done there to see how we can really create AI systems that have a lighter footprint.

That’s one, but also the sort of movement is creating a lot of pressure internationally for governments and the governance of AI, which is quite fragmented at the moment, to really look at how we can use existing data from low resource settings for challenges, such as deforestation. So using the sounds of like, let’s say logging, illegal logging and detecting sites of deforestation, AI being used for in a way countering the misinformation that is currently around on climate as well as using data that is currently available in parts of the world where there are some significant data gaps to help protect biodiversity.

So these are some of the areas which really make me quite optimistic in terms of using AI for sustainability.

HC: Thank you, Somya. I guess it’s rather natural to go over to the other side now about the more pessimistic aspects of technological development. It’s not always that technology works hand-in-hand with human needs. Do you have any fears or something that you’re afraid of that we will see technological development the coming year or perhaps a few years more that will hinder our work to tackle the triple crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution?

Are there certain technologies around the corner that will the problem worse in relation to where we are right now? Kelly, would you like to start again?

KL: Sure. No, I think it’s an important question, and certainly I have a few fears. Obviously, one is around exacerbating existing inequalities, which we’ve seen over and over again with technological advancements where marginalized communities may lack access to these technologies, but they also may not benefit from technological innovation if it’s not done well. And then that leads to a lack of public acceptance and some technologies that don’t scale as a result.

And that’s also quite connected to just transition where a concern of mine is that where technological advancement may occur, it may not be in the same places where incumbent technologies are. And we are going to need to see very significant transformation this decade and beyond and that is going to have tremendous societal consequences with some winners and some losers. And how we navigate those transitions is going to take really great care. So that’s one aspect that I’m quite nervous about.

HC: Thank you, Kelly. Somya, what are you worried about this year regarding technology and sustainable development?

SJ: Very related to what Kelly just said, one of the things that I’m quite worried about is the location of some of the sites where data centers are being currently put, which are water scarce. So the, the droughts and the water scarcity it gets exacerbated. Similar with energy poverty and the exploitation of labor. So very much my concerns are that we don’t repeat extractive narratives in the development of this technology.

HC: Yeah. Miquel, are you all optimist or do you have anything that you’re afraid of this year?

MMC: I’m always an optimist. But I’m so glad that Kelly brought the issue of inequality because that really is I think at the core of the concerns of technological development. Maybe since she mentioned that I will bring a different one, a different concern I have, and it’s a concern of complacency.

We live in a science fiction world, I mean, even this call we’re having right now, when I was a kid, that was a Star Trek science fiction, it didn’t exist. We have so many amazing technologies in whatever your field is. And yet we’re unable to provide some basic services, like [delivering] water to some people, food to some others, put out a fire here. So we may get complacent that we have this, nanotech can do this, AI will solve that, or stuff, and then, and not get the things done. So that’s one concern I have as well because it doesn’t take only technology, it takes the will to do the stuff and to apply technology in the way that it is most effective. And many times that’s the part we’re lacking not the technology itself. Thank you.

KL: And just to add something on, on what Miquel was saying. I often find also that related to this complacency, scale is not being thought of from the very, very beginning. So if you go to a, a poster session in the university and you kind of grill some of the doctoral students and postdocs about what it would actually take to scale this. They said, ‘Oh, I work in the lab. I haven’t really been thinking about that.’ And I think given some of the crises that we’re facing in humanity, it’s almost criminal not to think about scale from the very, very beginning.

There might be the coolest innovations, and if you don’t think about the inputs that are going to be required to scale those technologies, they’re going to go nowhere. What it would take to drive costs down so that they’re competitive with incumbent technologies. And that really requires interdisciplinary collaboration in a way that we often don’t do right with economists and with sociologists and what have you. So that’s quite related to this potential complacency where we kind of fool ourselves into thinking that we’ve developed solutions that are not going to be able to scale.

MMC: Yes, absolutely. I call that the Window Engineer Paradox. We often hear if we replace all the windows in the world, we fix climate change. There are reasons why this cannot be done, right? We’re part of a society that has many other considerations, not just the efficiency of a window or a lighting appliance or something. So the scaling up is critical and often overlooked. Fully agree.

HC: Thanks, Miquel. I see time is running fast. You know, in those Currents in sustainability, we are obliged to think about the coming year. But I think we can allow ourselves to think as a last question a little bit further into the future.

I would really like to use this opportunity to ask you what do you see if you look further into the future, like five, perhaps if you dare, 10 years into the future, what are the big technological developments or advancements that we will see in relation to sustainable development?

Do you have any thoughts about this that you want to share with us as the last question of today’s episode?

MMC: I’ll take that one. I’m actually an optimist on that one. I think long term sort of a sustainable development has the environmental dimension and the social dimension. On the environmental, we’re not doing that well right now, globally. But on the social, on the contrary, I think we’re doing very well. And if you look at humankind in the long history, there’s no time like today to be born, if you were born randomly anywhere in the world.

So a development I see in the next decade, I hope for, is that we have reached sufficient development levels in most of the world that people can actually afford to care about the environment. Because remember, when you’re very poor, you cannot afford to care about the environment. But once you have basic development levels and those things come more into consideration. So I think that’s the positive trend I see that with increasing levels of wealth and wellbeing across the globe there’s more will for action on environmental and equity issues.

KL: I couldn’t agree with Miquel more. And when I think about the climate crisis and what needs to happen, I think there’s another question as to whether or not it will happen fast enough. You can think about the fact that we need these transformations across all walks of society. So when you think about how we’re going to be supplying our power that there may be both the deployment much more rapid of the technologies that we have on hand, like solar and wind, but also maybe some advancements in other technologies like geothermal and nuclear, for example, and long duration storage, that’s going to be incredibly critical.

When you think about transportation, you think about some of the new fuels that are going to be needed. You think about hydrogen, for example. When you think about industry, you think about these so called harder to abate areas, like steel and cement and chemicals. How are we going to make that zero carbon in the future? And then you think about agriculture and how we’re going to grow our food for increasing populations and do it sustainably.

And the fact that we need to also make sure that we’re not encroaching on intact forests. And that’s going to be a big question about how are we going to be supplying protein and reducing methane emissions, for example, in agriculture.

And then even with the greatest reductions in emissions, the science suggests that we going to miss our climate goals and we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. That’s going to be a wealth of technological advancements that I hope that we’re going to start to see ramp up even more, not only direct air capture, which has been getting a tremendous amount of attention, but some of these other areas like oceans and rock based CDR (carbon dioxide removal) and even some thinking about would we ever want to be removing methane and nitrous oxide from the atmosphere. Does that make sense? And how AI plays into all of that is going to be just a kind of playground for anyone who wants to work in this field. So I think tremendous exciting developments on the horizon, and we just need to make sure that it’s scaled fast and deployed equitably and sustainably. Thanks.

HC: Thank you indeed Kelly. So Somya, you get the last word of today’s discussion.

SJ: Thanks Henrik. So I’m thinking again setting our sights on let’s say 2030 or where we had initially set our targets for the sustainable development goals.

AI can play a pivotal role in both us understanding where we’re at – so in terms of policy coherence, cohesion, really making sure that the tradeoffs and the synergies are more explicit for us achieving those goals. So one aspect is understanding where we’re at and what we can do. The other is unlocking that potential for action, whether it is in decarbonizing what used to be considered hard to abate sectors, or in the generation of new materials and material science that could help us really accelerate us achieving those goals.

So I really feel that the range of potential, and this is where I’m optimistic goes from the very micro. So going all the way down to our molecular genetic level of advancements that AI is enabling us to make in science: understanding in terms of protein folding and new pharmaceutical solutions for health. All the way to the macro level, which is, you know, in terms of understanding where we are in the universe and this is the way AI is currently being used to parse a lot of big data that’s coming in from the telescopes and, you know, astronomical sites.

So it really gives us that breadth of insight and changes the way we do science.

HC: Thank you very much, Somya.

So with this, we have come to the end of this episode. Thank you, Miquel, thank you, Somya, thank you very much, Kelly, for sharing your insightful thoughts about the role of technology in sustainable development. So thank you all and goodbye.