Promoting Digitalization and Green Technologies for Sustainable Development

摘要

Promoting Digitalization and Green Technologies for Sustainable Embracing the Sustainability Transformation Challenge Problem Statement: What Is the Nature of the Sustainable Development Challenge?Entering the twenty-first century, humanity is confronted with severe and aggravating risks to the global Earth system and its ecological balance.Most prominently, climate change impacts are affecting societies around the globe, calling for a rigorous reduction in GHG emissions and-ultimately-aiming at climate neutrality around the middle of the century.Hence, all countries worldwide are facing a joint challenge to setting the course for achieving the sustainable development of societies and economies while safeguarding the ecological foundations of our well-being and prosperity.From the broader perspective of the 17 sustainable development goals put forward in the United Nation's "Transforming Our World-2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development," the essence of the sustainability challenge is the need to coordinate and reconcile the development dynamics between the various dimensions of economy, society, and the ecological environment.While jointly experiencing numerous aggravating ecological crises, the world still faces divergent perspectives and trade-offs when entering zero-growth pathways of population and achieving equal economic prosperity on a global scale.One holistic approach to this challenge is China's Ecological Civilization strategy.Facing the resource and environmental problems that occurred during the process of accelerating industrialization and urbanization, the Report of the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) National Congress in 2012 proposed the strategy of Ecological Civilization Construction, believing that ecological civilization is the sum of material, spiritual, and institutional achievements made by human beings to protect and build a beautiful ecological environment.Also, it runs through the whole process of economic, political, cultural, and social construction.On March 24, 2015, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee deliberated and adopted the Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of Ecological Civilization (hereinafter referred to as the Opinions).In October 2015, strengthening the construction of ecological civilization was included in the national "Five-Year Plan" for the first time.On March 11, 2018, the sixth item, "leading and managing economic work and urban and rural construction," in Article 89 of the Constitution "The State Council exercises the following functions and powers," was revised to "leading and managing economic work, urban and rural construction, and ecological civilization construction" through the amendment to the Constitution adopted at the first session of the 13th National People's Congress revised.The construction of ecological civilization is considered a fundamental change in China's development notion and mode, involving various aspects of economic, political, cultural, and social construction.Closely related to the layout of productive forces, spatial pattern, industrial structure, production mode, and living styles, as well as the value concept and institutional system, ecological civilization construction is a comprehensive and systematic project. Technology System and Application AreasDigital technology is a complex technology system, including 17 key technologies, which are big data and cloud computing, the Internet of Things, intelligent robots, intelligent recommendation, 5G, blockchain, speech recognition, virtual/ augmented reality, AI chips, computer vision, natural language processing, biological recognition, space technology, photoelectric technology, automatic driving, human-computer interaction, and knowledge map.Digital technologies are widely applied to 19 applied fields in China, which are intelligent management of enterprises, intelligent marketing and new retail, scientific finance, smart city, smart medical treatment, new media and digita