Digital Technologies for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation: Evidence From the European Union

This paper demonstrates that digital sustainability inventions have started to emerge but constitute few of the EU27’s inventions during 2001-2018. This is the case even though the region offers the greatest breadth of relevant technological specialisations, which currently concentrate primarily in transportation and energy sectors. Nonetheless, the analysis shows that the EU27 lacks specialisation advantages in some key ICT-related technologies, as well as in the top four climate change mitigation and adaption technologies associated with digital sustainability inventions. The paper outlines possible pathways for smart specialisation in digital sustainability technologies, including in renewable energies, transportation, and carbon capture storage, using existing or complementary specialisations as well as international collaboration. We also provide open access to SQL queries, which can be used to recreate the dataset of digital sustainability inventions.