What Climate Change May Mean for Campus IT

The unfolding climate crisis will have many effects on civilization, including higher education and its digital infrastructure. This session, based on extensive research, forecasts the many ways campus IT can change in response to global warming, from increasing media production to decreasing certain computational tasks.

The session will explore the several domains of academic-global warming connection, including research, teaching, the physical campus, and community relations. Within that framework we situate campus IT in its various support functions. We forecast the impact on campus tech of campus transformations, from increasing climate research and teaching to overhauling physical campus operations. Next, we will probe the ways community relations can impact IT, building up to how regional or national policy around global warming might have effects on digital infrastructure. What does "green computing" mean in this context? We will conclude with several scenarios of campus IT, each based on certain trends and developments, and which participants can take back to their institutions.

Note: We invite you to continue the conversation on this topic by attending Bryan Alexander's follow-up session: "Continue the Conversation: What Climate Change May Mean for Campus IT" at 11:00-11:45 a.m. ET (Thursday, October 19).