Building a Sustainable Digital Future: Why the CODES Action Plan Matters

The way we design and use digital technologies will play a defining role in shaping our planet’s future. Over the past decade, digital tools have become deeply embedded in every aspect of our lives – transforming how we work, communicate, produce, and consume. But the big question remains: will digitalization accelerate sustainability, or will it deepen today’s environmental and social crises?

The Action Plan for a Sustainable Planet in the Digital Age, co-created under the Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES), attempts to answer exactly that. Presented at UNEA-5.2 in Nairobi, this plan provides a global vision for harnessing digital innovation to tackle the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, while also addressing inequality and health risks.

Three Shifts We Need to Make

The Action Plan highlights that digitalization will not automatically lead to sustainability. To make it work, three major shifts are essential:

1. Enable alignment: Align the values and goals of the digital age with sustainable development, moving beyond profit only mindsets toward socio-environmental benefits.
2. Mitigate negative impacts: Actively address the downsides of digitalization: high energy use, materials extraction, e-waste, misinformation, inequality, and rights violations.
3. Accelerate innovation: Channel resources, incentives, and investments into digital solutions that unlock sustainability, such as digital twins of the planet, circular economy platforms, knowledge commons, and inclusive governance tools.

Each shift comes with six strategic priorities ranging from building digital skills and coalitions, to setting clear norms for transparency and accountability, to enabling new forms of innovation that support planetary health.

Why This Matters Now

Digital technologies can measure emissions in real time, optimise resource use, power smart grids, and even create “digital twins” of ecosystems to test solutions before deploying them. AI, IoT sensors, blockchain, and gamification are already helping industries cut waste and align supply chains around shared sustainability goals.

But without deliberate action, digitalization may do more harm than good – locking in unsustainable consumption, widening inequalities, and accelerating environmental degradation. The Action Plan reminds us that progress depends not on the technologies themselves, but on how we choose to govern and deploy them.

What Is CODES?

CODES was launched in 2021 in response to the UN Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation. It is a multi-stakeholder alliance that now includes more than 1,000 participants – from governments and UN agencies to NGOs, academia, and private sector leaders. Its co-champions include UNEP, UNDP, the International Science Council, Future Earth, the German Environment Agency, and the Ministry of Environment in Kenya.

The coalition’s role is clear: to steer digital technologies toward accelerating sustainable development and the 2030 Agenda, ensuring the digital economy strengthens, not undermines, global sustainability.

Next Steps

The draft Action Plan is being used to inform upcoming global processes, including the Global Digital Compact and preparations for COP and Stockholm+50. In the meantime, CODES will continue to gather feedback, mobilize political commitments, and promote “impact initiatives” across all three shifts.

The goal is simple but urgent: to ensure digital transformation becomes a driver of climate solutions, social inclusion, and a healthy planet – not a new layer of risk.

🔑 In short: Digital technologies are not inherently sustainable or unsustainable. They are tools, and the choices we make now will determine whether they help us achieve the SDGs or accelerate the very crises we are trying to solve. The CODES Action Plan is a call to align, mitigate, and innovate, so the digital age truly supports a sustainable future.