The European Commission adopted the Circular Economy Action Plan in 2020 as a central element of the European Green Deal, thereby affirming the importance of the transition towards a circular economy for sustainable development. Digitalization, in turn, offers great potential to support a shift towards a circular economy and can be an enabler to improve sustainability by increasing efficiency, dematerializing certain products or even re-structuring material flows. Yet, empirical evidence shows that digitalization is so far hardly the game-changer for sustainability that it promised to be.  

In the project „Digitalization and sustainability at the EU level: Opportunities and risks of digitalization for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda at the EU level” the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW) and the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) work on novel perspectives regarding policies for digital sustainability. The project is funded by the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA). The central objective of the project is to develop policy ideas for the German government to make digitalization a driver for sustainability at the EU level. 

The central aim of the workshop is to discuss how digitalization can act as an enabler for a circular economy and the role of governance in this context. Together with you and other experts from science, policymaking, and civil society, we would like to discuss the challenges and potentials of a digital circular economy and how governance structures could be shaped in light of these. We are looking forward to hearing your perspective on these questions at the workshop. 

More Information about the project can be found here.

This expert workshop is implemented as part of the R & D project “Digitalization and Sustainability at the EU level” (research code: 3720 41 101 0) on behalf of the German Environment Agency (UBA), and financed by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV).