The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) establish a vision to protect the environment and climate, guaranteeing peace and prosperity to everyone. In particular, SDG 13 contemplates urgent measures to combat climate change and its societal impacts.

In support of SDG13 and other UN SDGs, the IFIP Executive Committee has recently approved the creation of the task force, “IFIP Climate Change and Digital Technology”.

The General Purpose of such a task force is to identify challenges and opportunities to take advantage of digital technologies to combat climate change and its impacts, including technical recommendations and activities for global community engagement, relevant projects, and events.

The task force membership is under construction and is currently composed of members from Australia, Brazil, England, Germany, Ireland, Japan and Turkey. The first Task Force meeting will occur virtually on 1st February at 11 am GMT.

The current membership of the task force includes:

  • Chair of the Task Force, Raimundo J de A Macêdo, President and IFIP National Representative of the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC);
  • David Cook (ACS), Vice President and IFIP National Representative of the Australian Computer Society (ACS);
  • David Kreps, National University of Ireland, chair of IFIP TC09;
  • Gülgün Kayakutlu (WG 12.11), chair of WG 12.11, professor at ITU (Istanbul Technical University);
  • Liwan Liyanage, Senior Lecturer, School of Computer, Data and Mathematical Sciences, Western Sydney University;
  • John Higgins (BCS), Immediate Past President and nominee of the British Computer Society (BCS), Chartered Institute of IT, UK;
  • Marcelo Pias (SBC), Adjunct professor at the Center for Computational Sciences at the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG), Brazil;
  • Otthein Herzog, AI Research Professor, University of Bremen, Mathematics/ Informatics, Germany; and
  • Yuko Murayama,  Researcher, Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science, Tsuda University, Japan. Past chair of WG 5.15 – Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction.