Digitalization and the Decoupling Debate: Can ICT Help to Reduce Environmental Impacts While the Economy Keeps Growing?
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper discusses an innovative question related to green IT’ and ‘ICT for green by questioning the relation between economic growth and environmental performances. The main question is to have a better understanding of the relation between the mitigating and the aggravating impacts of digitalization.
The topic is very important and the literature review is rich and very useful. But as mentioned in the paper further researches are needed to try to give solutions or approaches for this complex question.
The given examples are relevant but the analyses are very descriptive. The data collection process and mobilization are very limited and a literature review isn’t enough to get deep analysis. Dialogue with stakeholders and scientific collection of data are mandatory. The authors mention the needs for the need of further researches, this is necessary to give more scientific dimensions to the paper.
The key arguments in table 1 need more explanations and justifications.
On the basis of the relevant and impressive literature review, this research needs to be completed with more in field research. Collecting data is mandatory !
Author Response
We would like to express our deepest thanks for the comments made, which allows us to improve our document.
#1 Regarding the comment that the analysis is decriptive and more empirical data is needed:
Answer Authors: This paper is a conceptual paper based on the basis of an in-depth and broad literature review. If it were an empirical paper, it would look completely different. The conceptual link between i) the long-standing decoupling debates, in its various strains, and ii) the 'ICT for Sustainability' research is new and has not been addressed in any publication before. Moreover, the entire question of how digitalization (ICT) impacts on the environment is a very urgent topic that is highly underresearched - both empirically (the reviewer is therefore right!), but also in terms of theoretical and conceptuatl analysis. Our paper addresses the latter research niche.
However, in order to address the reviewer’s concern, we have now worked ourselves through long-term country-specific data (1995-2017) on i) economic growth, ii) ICT sector growth, iii) energy demand, iv) CO2-emissions. We have developed four new graphs for EU28, USA, China and India in order to picture the empirical situation at the outset of our paper. This mainly serves to outline why a deeper conceptual, qualitative analysis of the arguments in the debate is needed – to better understand the interrelationship between digitalization, growth and environmental impacts, and to better prepare for future empirical research.
#2 Regarding the comment that arguments in table 1 need to be better justified:
Answer Authors: Table 1 just provides an overview of all preliminary conclusions (section 4.1-4.5) and overall conclusions (section 5) that have been mentioned before. There are no new or additional informations in table 1 which would need additional clarification/justifications. To make this clear, we have inserted an additional sentence: “Table 1 condenses the preliminary conclusions from section 4.1-4.5 as well as section 5 and hence, summarizes how digital technologies“.
In addition, we have slightly redesigned table 1 in order to better allow to comprehend the allocate the summaries to the five strains of decoupling debates.
Attached, the reviewer finds a new version of the document with track changes (but without indications of authorship) in order to quickly picture new texts and text changes.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
There are some self-citations detected in the manuscript. Self-citation is perfectly reasonable if used to make the article shorter. So please, delete self-cited articles.
Author Response
We would like to express our deepest thanks for the comments made, which allows us to improve our document.
We have counted all self-citations, have deleted several of them and hence, have limited the number to the minimum, where it makes sense to save explanations.
Besides, we have changed several passages and added a new subchapter, partly also due to other reviewer's comments.
We therefore upload a new document with track changes (but without indications of authorship) in order for the review quickly picture new text and text changes.
Reviewer 3 Report
This article is could be organized in a better way, especially, sections 2 and 3 need a connection.
The synthesis of the thought process was not clear enough on section 2
Author Response
We would like to express our deepest thanks for the comments made, which allows us to improve our document.
Reviewer comment #1: "This article is could be organized in a better way, especially, sections 2 and 3 need a connection. Authors abruptly introduced ICT in section 3. Need a clear transition between section 2 and 3. How the authors derived ICT application from the literature review (section 2)."
Answer Authors: We feel the connection between section 2 and section 3 is quite strong: In section 2 we discuss key arguments from five strains of the decoupling debate (2.1 - 2.5) in general; in section 3 we address the core arguments from section of these strains in a one-by-one manner in relation to digitalization (3.1 – 3.5). Each subsection of section 3 starts with a very short summary of the findings from each corresponding subsection in section 2, i.e., 3.1 links back to 2.1; 3.2 links back to 2.2, and so forth. It would be good to know what reviewer #3 means by “sections 2 and 3 need a connection”.
To make this procedure even more clear, we have inserted the following new sentence at the beginning of section 3: “In this section 3, we will now revisit the five strains of the decoupling debate summarized in section 2 and link them to the role of digitalization (ICT) for both economic growth and environmental impacts.”
Reviewer comment #2: "The synthesis of the thought process was not clear enough on section 2"
Answer Authors: We have inserted a new paragraph at the beginning of section 2, which introduces and contextualizes the five following subsections: “Without claiming to be exhaustive, we focus on five strains of that debate: the ‘Limits to growth’ debate, which started with a seminal study with the same title in 1972 (3.1); the debate about the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), which has been the key reason in the debate on structural economic change and environmental impacts (3.2); the debate on the role of energy as a production factor for economic growth, including both views from energy economics and ecological economics (3.3); the debate on energy efficiency improvements and rebound effects as one particular focus of the role of energy for growth (3.4); and finally, the debate on the role of general purpose technologies for both environmental impacts and economic growth (3.5). Afterwards, in section 4, we will revisit the key arguments of these five strains and link them to the question of digitalization.”
Reviewer comment #3: "Need more background when authors introduced EKC in section 2.2-"
- i) what are the other concepts that are used to solve this similar problem?
- ii) why EKC concept was used here?
Answer Authors: We have inserted the following sentence with one additional reference explaining why the EKC can be considered a strain of the decoupling debate: “Hence it can be considered a strain of the decoupling debate, because arguments based on the EKC assume that environmental impacts would decrease with rising economic growth, at least in industrialized countries.”
In addition, we have inserted two more sentences with two more references to Panayotou et al. and Dinda – one each per key EKC argument – to better illustrate the reasoning.
Reviewer comment #4: When the authors explained the "Role of energy for economic growth" in section 2.3, they could also argue the "Energy efficiency and the rebound effect" in the same section.
Answer Authors: this is true: the debate about energy efficiency and rebound effects can be considered a subtopic of the wider debate about the role of energy for growth. Thanks to this comment, we have made this clear in the new paragraph at the beginning of section 2 (before 2.1) see above. And we have again mentioned this at the beginning of section 2.4: “One particular focus of the energy-growth-debate centres on the role of energy efficiency improvements for economic growth, which relates to the phenomenon of the rebound effect”
However, because the rebound debate is very extensive, and for reasons of clarity in the structure of this article, we would still favor the rebound issue to be a sole subsection in this article and not to be incorporated under 2.3. As we will see, literature on digital rebound effects abounds and hence, subsection 2.4 an clearly be picked up in the corresponding section 3.4.
Besides, we have changed several passages and added a new subchapter, partly also due to other reviewer's comments.
We therefore upload a new document with track changes (but without indications of authorship) in order for the review quickly picture new text and text changes.
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
All the comments were addressed in the revisions. Some texts could be reduced and presented in a concise way. For a broader audience, a crisp and well-organized article is recommended.
