Metaverse holds promises on accelerating progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), for instance, in health, biology computation, automotive, manufacturing, and education.
In education and training, the metaverse can provide more realistic experiences than traditional ones, replacing costly or hazardous physical experiences. It can improve medical treatments and training, for instance, providing surgical trainees with authentic experiences in a 3D operating room. For mental health and neurological diagnoses, it can simulate real scenarios, allowing observation of patient reactions.
However, digital spaces have inherent costs and pose new environmental, social, and economic risks. If not properly governed, the rise of metaverse can amplify adverse environmental consequences inherent to its enabling technologies (e.g., AI, A/R, blockchains, IoT and digital twins) leading to increased CO2-emissions, e-waste, and resource consumption, harming local ecosystems, communities, and their businesses.
Moreover, emerging AI risks related, for instance, to manipulation, disinformation, isolation, echo chambers, and amplification of individual/group discriminations can be expanded by the metaverse. In business, high-performance hardware and costly resources needed to develop, test and maintain metaverse applications could be an economic barrier for SMEs, start-ups and non-profit organizations, thus deepening influence and power gaps. Moreover, the development of resource-intensive metaverse can amplify long-term rebound-effects risks, leading to a substantial increase in CO2 emissions and resource consumption. To advance SDGs through the metaverse, it’s vital to:
- Prioritize solutions addressing environmental and societal challenges (Metaverse for Sustainability);
- Make metaverse ecosystems sustainable by design from the environmental, social and economic perspectives (Sustainability of Metaverse).
To address both aspects it is paramount to adopt a comprehensive design approach that is able to 1) integrate environmental, social and economic needs/costs into the system model and system’s building blocks and 2) evaluate multi-dimensional sustainability impacts of the system along with their inter-linkages. Indeed, single-path design approaches pursuing only technical enhancements or business growth or individual sustainability issues without considering the bigger picture often led to system inefficiencies and sustainability drawbacks, sometimes exacerbating existing sustainability issues or even creating new ones.
The ITU Technical Specifications on the design of Sustainable Metaverse have been developed within the ITU Task Group on Sustainable Metaverse of FGMV comprised by global experts from academia, business and institutions. The document poses the foundations for a sustainable design. It defines “sustainability” for a metaverse ecosystem and design criteria that should guide practitioners in integrating AI ethical principles as well as environmental, social and economic sustainability considerations when defining algorithms, datasets, AI models and the system architecture. Additionally, the document defines flexible technical requirements to increase sustainability system impact and mitigate risks.
You can find the full text online.