Sustainability through digital transformation: EU practices

Abstract

The significance of sustainability efforts has been reaffirmed by negative circumstances, such as the escalating visible consequences of climate change, floods resulting from erratic weather patterns in certain areas, and fires and extreme droughts in other regions. The logical rationale behind employing digital tools for sustainability purposes lies in the efficiency of digital transformation, supported by artificial intelligence, in improving remote access, control, and decision-making processes, as well as accomplishing tasks that are unachievable through human effort alone. Upon analyzing practices worldwide, it becomes apparent that the European Union (EU) is the singular entity that places utmost importance on digitalization as a means to ensure sustainability. Additionally, it provides comprehensive allocations for projects pertaining to this subject and supports the collective wisdom of its members through the established union. Hence, the purpose of this study is to examine the current literature in detail via a systematic review to extract the EU practices of sustainability through digitalization. Findings reveal the particular EU focuses and key themes on achieving sustainability with a visual representation of the results. Besides, the EU practices with other well-known countries on sustainability through digitalization efforts are compared and discussed. Thus, a practitioner can understand the findings of this research to use as the first step when generating research questions to start a new study.