Joanna Boehnert, Jo Walton, Simon Gough, and Paris Selinas
The United Kingdom government has committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050 with the legal frameworks of the Climate Change Act (2008) and the Environment Act (2021). Transition Templates (TT) is a participatory systems mapping method developed to help organisations and communities decarbonise their processes. Transition Templates facilitate insight and strategy for possible energy and ecological transitions. TT was prototyped in the AI and digital sector with the AHRC Future Observatory funded Transition Templates AI & Digital: Pathways to Net Zero+ (TT-A&D) (2025) project. The structured Transition Templates four-step process supports group work in navigating political, economic, social, and technological change. The TT process pivots around an ecological design future envisioning exercise mapping four alternative future digital ecosystems. This process is applied to the AI and Digital sector, a site of accelerating greenhouse gas emissions often obscured by misinformation and hype, to stretch imaginaries of possible digital futures and bring sustainable design theory into the digital futuring space. To be clear, any credible net zero pathway for AI and digital systems would need to reckon with the sector’s wider political economy alongside the decarbonisation of data centres. We are far from any such policy landscape. AI expansion is proceeding amid extensive tech corporate influence over climate accounting, renewed investment in gas infrastructure, AI-emissions enabled outside the sector—and poorly evidenced claims about AI-enabled mitigation. Furthermore, growth in data centres centre emissions is undermining energy transitions in other sectors. In this context, we prototyped Transition Templates with practitioners, academics, and SMEs working at the intersection of sustainability and digital design to explore possible energy and ecological transitions. The paper introduces the research context, the TT method and the research process, and reflects on findings and implications for this sector. The Transition Templates method creates a structure for groups to envision diverse future options and develop strategies to make sustainable options possible.
Keywords: decarbonisation, net zero, participatory systems mapping, transition design, AI, digital.