COP27: Professor Patrick Bolton presents
November 6, 2022 Patrick Bolton

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At the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, also known as COP27, Luohan Academy was honored to have the opportunity for Distinguished Fellow Professor Patrick Bolton to present on our research report Digital Circular Economy for Net-Zero. This report was published in April 2022 and was written by staff researchers at Luohan Academy in collaboration with respected scholars around the world. It discusses the challenges, opportunities, and critical importance of leveraging digital technologies to enable a less resource intensive and “circular” economy, notably focusing on the consumer economy.


Bolton began by laying out the fundamental challenge of reaching net-zero. The good news has been the seriousness displayed by the global community. Net-zero commitments from governments now cover 90% of global GDP. Additionally, over 800 firms have responded with their own net-zero commitments. But the problem remains of how to actually implement de-carbonization, especially at the level of consumers.


As outlined in the report, part of the answer lies in scalable and powerful digital technologies. This includes ways technology can empower consumers and businesses to reduce resource consumption. Bolton remarked that “digital technology is the technology that will allow us to enhance and scale the circular economy,” adding that “the full promise of digital technology is that potentially you could have a digital product passport.” Data and information is critical as consumers will have more transparency and guidance in consumption patterns and behaviors.


Bolton presented some of the examples in the report, these include cases such as Idle Fish, a China-based platform that is the world’s largest second-hands good market. Mechanism design and links to other e-commerce systems factored greatly in the growth. The report also include cases with ambiguous environmental results, such as ride-sharing where research has shown potentially more vehicle miles driven owing to the convenience and cost improvements. The important lesson that Bolton impressed from the report is that technologies cannot be thought of as stand-alone solutions but must be combined into “social-technical systems.”


To this end, Bolton believes the key message of the report is that we beyond technology, “you need to also change the way communities operate, the way cities are run. So government markets communities, all social networks must participate in promoting more sustainable forms of behavior in the digital circular economy.”


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