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To tackle climate change in the digital economy, there has been increasing attention to the role of information technology (IT) investment in decoupling economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions, or reducing carbon intensity. This research examines the impact of cloud computing on carbon intensity and further scrutinizes how the advent of cloud computing has altered the relationship between IT capital and carbon intensity. We combine data on IT capital stock for 51 countries during 1995-2014 with a natural experiment involving the staggered launches of cloud data centers across countries. Our preliminary findings suggest that cloud on-ramps availability is positively associated with carbon intensity, whereas it negatively moderates the impact of IT capital on carbon intensity. Taken together, our preliminary evidence implies that the environmental impact of cloud computing may not be as adverse as conjectured if we factor in its indirect effect on making overall IT capital greener. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have a nonlinear relationship with CO2 emissions, specifically an inverted U-shaped curve similar to the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). While extant research has investigated the relationship using an ICT index, there has been no research looking at smartphones, which have been closely associated with the explosive growth in the use of mobile apps and a build-out of large information systems to support their use. To address this gap, this research examines the relationship of ICTs and smartphones with CO2 emissions by employing a country-level data set for the period from 2009 to 2014. Our results show that the relationship of ICTs with CO2 emissions takes an inverted U-shaped curve form, consistent with the EKC hypothesis. Our OLS results also show that CO2 emissions increase with spending on smartphones but decrease as smartphone spending increases further; however, these results are not consistent in fixed effects models. These findings imply that carbon emissions go up with the penetration of ICTs in poorer countries but in wealthier countries ICT penetration and smartphone spending is related to lower CO2 emissions. The results should not be taken as evidence that ICTs cannot lead to greater sustainability in poorer countries, but should be seen as a call for the IS community to help all countries apply existing knowledge and develop new knowledge to use ICTs to reduce emissions in response to the immediate challenge of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]