THE EUROPEAN – SECURITY AND DEFENCE UNION
The potential of digitalisation is still difficult to quantify or qualify
Digitalisation and climate protection: can they go hand in hand? by Oliver Bruzek, Policy officer of CompuGroup Medical (CGM), Berlin
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he question of whether the comprehensive digitalisation of our society can contribute to sustainable economic activity and active climate protection, or whether it is more likely to place a greater burden on our planet, is the subject of controversial debate. Today’s high consumption of resources, especially for the production of hardware, contrasts with a considerable potential for savings in a wide range of areas. However, before any closer consideration, the following should be clear to everyone: it is pointless to even think about whether we need more or less digitalisation for climate protection reasons. It will be comprehensive and successively penetrate (almost) all areas of life. Even today, we would simply no longer be able to cope with our everyday lives without digital solutions, starting with the organisation of infrastructure and extending to production processes and trade.
The benefits in the health sector The benefits in the health sector, for example, can be illustrated in ecological and economic terms, quite independently of a purely medical consideration. Let us just take the current example of vaccine development against the Covid-19 virus. The speed at which vaccines have been developed based on data-driven research is almost ten times faster than conventional research. The saving of resources is significant. It is even easier for each of us to grasp the savings potential of digital healthcare when we think of the phenomenon of rare diseases. Although only a relatively small number of people suffer from a particular rare disease, there are over 8,000 different ones, with about 4 million people affected in Germany alone. On average, it takes about five years before the disease is diagnosed properly. This does not only mean countless trips to different doctors, but also often taking completely unsuitable drugs – which have to be produced and delivered. Digital diagnostic procedures controlled by algorithms can reduce this effort many times over, to the great benefit of the patients.
we need is more “What investment in digitalisation, rather than less.”
Using the full potential of digitalisation Science today cannot cope without big data and our communications would collapse. In addition, citizens consider the benefits to be so high that they simply no longer want to live without digital tools. From today’s perspective, the potential of digitalisation is still difficult to quantify or qualify. For the most part, we are still in a phase of electrification of many processes and are still in the early stages of developing and using IT-supported systems. The use of artificial intelligence has only just tentatively begun.
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Saving resources in the manufacturing sector In the manufacturing sector, maximum conservation of resources can nowadays only be achieved with IT-controlled systems, and the same applies to the agricultural sector. Heating and cooling systems only work efficiently with computer-controlled systems that have the highest level of economy, achieved in terms of both resource use and emissions. Without digitalisa-
