Introduction

The development of telecommunications networks has long been associated with environmental and ecological costs. Such an association is not unprecendented. In the mid nineteenth century, for example, when the inherent thermoplastic properties of latex harvested from a tree native to South East Asia (Gutta-percha, or Palaquium gutta) had been discovered, and allowed for overcoming the problem of insulating subsea telegraphic cables, a huge demand for this natural resource was spurred. By the end of the nineteenth century, the scale of demand had become so great that the species was close to extinction, bringing about what has been referred to as a “Victorian ecological disaster” (Tully 2009).

Present-day telecommunication risks disrupting economic systems and social structures.

Today, once more, major ongoing environmental and ecological challenges are tied to the rapid growth of data networks and information and communication technologies (ICT), with increasingly alarming evidence pointing to their material and energy demands (Monserrate 2022). Moreover, from network infrastructures to application, present-day telecommunication risks disrupting economic systems and social structures; it can lead to unbalanced economic growth by favoring a few organizations and individuals and promote a range of activities that contribute to social fragmentation and a deterioration of democratic systems.

In assessing the direct environmental impact of ICT networks, there exists commonly used energy metrics, such as energy per bit and carbon intensity. But in practice, it is difficult to measure and attribute the energy use of highly distributed and multi-layered ICT systems accurately. For example, one of the most widely cited energy metrics for data centers, power usage efficiency, has struggled with inconsistent measures because it does not specify where exactly the power should be measured in the power delivery grid of a data center (van de Voort et al. 2017). And data centers are only one component of ICT networks, alongside core and access networks, mobile base stations, routers, switches, servers, and end-user devices, with each component consuming energy differently. Furthermore, the emphasis on energy metrics often fails to account for other aspects of environmental sustainability and global impacts of ICT. For example, recent industry-led efforts to account for the environmental sustainability of ICT have been critiqued for their narrow focus on energy metrics and the overlooking of wider rebound effects (Luccioni et al. 2025a). While conventional assessment methods such as life cycle assessment are still used, there is increased acknowledgement of their shortcomings as metrics of social and environmental impact are not considered until deployment and manufacturing supply chains are evaluated, years after the design phase, and often only when third-party studies reveal flaws (van der Giesen et al. 2020).

Beyond the direct environmental costs, the assessment of telecommunications sustainability impacts is further complicated when socio-political, economic and further-reaching indirect environmental factors are considered. For example, while many telecommunications developments such as internet of things (IoT) enabled sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) applications purport to advance positive environmental impact, they simultaneously fail to address contradictory social, political and economic factors at play (Gabrys 2020; Green 2019; Powell 2021). For example, in the case of deploying smart waste management systems that are intended to improve urban environmental waste services, it has been shown that misaligned labour practices and business models can make such measures ineffective and even problematic.

The development and deployment of advanced mobile network standards has been mired with criticisms and concerns. In the case of 5G, these have ranged from questions of the overproliferation of infrastructures and devices (Mattern 2019); the social need and public utility (McDermott 2022); the resultant technocratic control and concentration of power (Robson 2023), as well as the controversial public health issues associated with electromagnetic radiation and the conspiracy theories linking COVID-19 to 5G (Flaherty et al. 2022). Subsequently, in the ongoing preparation for the next generation of mobile network technologies, namely 6G (sixth-generation mobile networks), there is increased pressure on the telecom research and development (R & D) community to be more cognizant of the broader consequences of their work. The current development envisions 6G as essentially a more advanced and capable version of 5G, allowing for higher speed and lower latency. It aims to address the limitations of 5G and to enable a wider range of applications and use cases, including virtual reality, augmented reality, and advanced automation. This includes considerations of how 6G technologies can create value across various sectors, while also addressing societal and environmental challenges as well as combatting the societal acceptance issues of 5G technologies.

In taking up lessons learned from the 5G experience and advancing the cause of 6G developments, the mission of sustainability has been singled out as a key motif for envisioning the future development of 6G applications (Latva-aho et al. 2019). In this sense, 6G is presented as a transformative infrastructure, merging capabilities of AI, telecommunication and sensing, targeting sustainable development goals (SDGs). Importantly, within this new framing the relationship between sustainability and 6G development is considered in two ways. First, in terms of the direct impact of the technology on the ecological footprint, and second, in terms of its indirect impact, that is, its enabling effect on various sectors’ environmental, economic and social sustainability.

However, properly measuring and accounting for the various forms of sustainability impact, particularly the indirect ones, is an unsolved problem with unique challenges for different cases and sectors. The use of key value indicators (KVIs) has been proposed as a new tool for identifying and assessing a broad range of impacts of technological advances like 6G networks. How these key values and key value indicators are to be obtained and refined remains open.

Key concepts and frameworks

Sustainability in 6G research and development

In the context of EU funded 6G R & D, the term ‘sustainability’ is used as a wide-ranging concept that covers environmental, social and economic aspects (Hoffmann et al. 2021). This follows the sustainability principle of “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” as set out in the World Commission on Environment and Development report (1987, p. 16). It aligns with the triple bottom line framework, as has been commonly used in organizational and institutional contexts including that of the EU (Sala 2020). It is also the basis for the UN SDGs, a global framework of goals with the ambition of addressing across-the-board sustainability challenges by 2030 (UN 2015).

As previously mentioned, in 6G R & D, the relationship between sustainability and 6G technologies is considered in two respects. First, there is the consideration of the direct sustainability impact of 6G technology, foremost its direct energy consumption and material footprint (referred to as ‘sustainable 6G’). It requires understanding and ameliorating direct material and energy requirements during the lifecycle (Hoffmann et al. 2021, p. 90). Second, in new assessment frameworks for the development of 6G the indirect or sustainability enabling impact of the technology in various sectors is considered (referred to as ‘6G for sustainability’). It requires a much broader consideration of of a wide array of 6G-induced positive and adverse effects (Hoffmann et al. 2021).

Introducing key value indicators

In an effort to account for a wider set of sustainability impacts across 6G developments, the KVI framework has been set out as a means to evaluate predicted impacts and outcomes for affected stakeholders. Emanating from technology design for performance and the associated key performance indicators (KPIs), which are widely used to measure technical aspects of telecom networks (throughput, speed, latency, reliability, spectrum efficiency, etc.), it aims at the design of technology for value(s) as per use case and associated set of KVIs. KVIs have been proposed by International Telecommunication Union, academia, and numerous 6G white papers as a complementary layer so as to capture the value contribution of a technology to society, economy, and the environment. They for example measure the ‘contribution to workers well-being’ or the ‘improvement in rural connectivity.’

The aforementioned UN SDG framework is commonly used as the scafolding structure for defining and assessing the KVIs. The KVI methodology relies on mapping the relationship between key values, challenges, target areas and KPI/KVIs as per use case. The KPI/KVI mapping involves demonstrating how achieving specific technical performance metrics drives the creation of value (for example, meeting the KPIs of higher speeds of service and reduced latency of networking, supports the KVIs of cost savings per avoided downtime and energy saved). The identification of an SDG is used as the basis for achieving a key value of sustainability and for defining relevant key value indicators. KVIs, in turn, act as forms of impact assessment, mapping potential 6G use cases onto SDGs, for example, smart grids to SDG 7, energy, and SDG 13, climate action.

Applying key value indicators to 6G: the case of e-health

While the KVI approach in 6G R & D has yet to be implemented, the document ‘Expanded 6G vision, use cases and societal values’ (Hoffmann et al. 2021) offers examples of how the framework would be operationalized, presenting idealized scenarios of how future 6G technologies would address sustainability challenges as aligned with the UN SDGs. Here we take the specific case of e‑health as one example area to demonstrate the application of KVIs to 6G.

E‑health is the use of ICT services to deliver, improve, and manage healthcare services. It covers a wide range of applications including digital healthcare systems, telemedicine, IoT devices and advanced AI-driven diagnostics. 6G is expected to be a key enabler of e‑health applications, because it is intended to deliver fast connectivity, low latency, massive IoT integration, and AI based designs. Examples of technical KPIs relevant to e‑health include reduced delay in remote consultation and increased accuracy of AI diagnostic models.

As per the description of e‑health use case in the document ‘Expanded 6G vision, use cases and societal values’ (Hoffmann et al. 2021), there are multiple SDG targets that e‑health could contribute to, including: Target 3.8: Achieve universal health coverage; Target 3C: Increase health financing and support health workforce in developing countries; Target 5.6: Universal access to reproductive health and rights, and; Target 16.6: Develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels. These identified SDGs act as guidance for the definition of key values that could be potentially impacted in a positive way by the introduction of the technology. Subsequently, KVIs (as associated with the key values) are formulated in order to measure the scale and level of impact. In the e‑health use case, such KVIs might be: average gain in healthcare access; number of active users; number of hospital stays, etc. Following the use case deployments, the outcome of the KVIs are to be gauged, and subsequently compared with formulated targets, after which the value impact can be assessed.

Challenges

Key value indicators as derived from key performance indicators

The KVI model is strongly tied to the KPI model, but this results in a number of shortcomings. While one might quantify and assess the performance of a technology easily, this is not the case with quantifying and assessing the value outcome for different use case scenarios and different groups of stakeholders.

Sustainability as defined in generalized terms

The key values as derived from the UN SDGs are often defined at a very abstract level, beyond any specific context of deployment. Aligning key values of future 6G developments with the UN SDGs thus results in a top-down and generalized approach, which subsequently lacks operational specificity and sensitivity to geopolitical contexts. To inform practical implementation, the diversity of contextual socio-economic and political factors needs to be defined more precisely in order to meet the requirements of specific local conditions and to gain acceptance from a wide variety of societal actors (Kropp et al. 2021). To this end, Wikström et al. (2024) outline an alternative KVI framework, deriving key values and intended outcomes from the use cases in a more bottom-up manner.

Overpromising net positive value

Throughout the literature on KVIs in 6G R & D, there is a strong normative assumption that 6G will bring added positive value in addressing a wide range of sustainability challenges, while negative implications or tradeoffs are overlooked or downplayed. This position of technology as (solely) adding value is not unique to the case of 6G technologies (Birhane et al. 2022). As Wikström et al. (2024) point out, much of the R & D work on ICT has not been based on empirical assessment but instead is vision-based. Critical technology studies illustrate how technological developments that overpromise on transformative change, often overlook significant socio-cultural, political and economic factors at play. (Kropp et al. 2021). For example, the sustainability claims of 6G purport to improve efficiency of services while simultaneously reducing environmental costs. But as many scholars have demonstrated, the increase in efficiency of ICT systems ultimately generates an increase in resource utilization and associated environmental costs (Gossart 2015; Adelmeyer et al. 2017; Luccioni et al. 2025b). Consideration for such competing values and implications are absent throughout the literature.

Assessing value over time ex-post

Sustainability related measurements such as energy use are often applied to a specific technology or subset of technologies without considering the full end-to-end system. This problem is compounded by the fact that the evaluation of sustainability impacts requires post-deployment observations over a sufficient period of time to identify the persistent and long-term trends. Furthermore, while KVIs are intended to bring attention to measures that might indicate future impact, the evaluation ex-post is commonly not planned for.

Assessing group-specific values

A robust assessment framework would require engaging with the varying expectations of all affected stakeholders and end-users throughout the entirety of the R & D process, including a sufficient period post-deployment. This would allow for a more balanced assessment of the interrelated trade-offs (benefits/harms) of how 6G-enabled services and solutions function across different use case scenarios as well as over different timescales (short-term, medium-term, long-term). By allowing space to ask questions of how 6G technologies might create opportunities but also challenges, the hope is to promote more intentional and equitable technological development. To this end, the formal application of technology assessment (TA) to emerging 6G technologies could contribute in bringing to the foreground the varied perspectives, interests, and knowledge of relevant affected parties. In particular 6G R & D would benefit from participatory technology assessment (pTA) for involving citizens and non-experts directly in the TA. This involvement could pre-empt issues of social exclusion and perceived value by involving communities in discussions about sustainability, accessibility, and data privacy. In addition, constructive technology assessment (cTA) would be beneficial in allowing diverse stakeholders (citizens, civic society, policymakers, etc.) in actively shaping the technology development direction through interactions with the technical developers early on and throughout the R & D process. This early involvement in the technology design could assist in anticipating and influencing potential impacts before lock-in. Ultimately both pTA and cTA could bring much-needed reflexivity to the 6G R & D process, forcing technical developers to reflect on assumptions (e.g., ‘more connectivity is always good’) and to adjust roadmaps, which in turn will lead to applications that are better aligned to the societal needs than those driven by the KPI/KVI framework.

Conclusions

In the dual contexts of increased pressure for more ICT networked systems for sustainability efforts, and increasing global resource scarcity from energy, raw materials and ecosystems survival, there is an ever greater need to understand which, and to what effect, ICT technologies produce meaningful outcomes and public value. While KVIs are a proposed new tool to account for the wide-ranging dimensions of sustainability impacts of 6G technologies, they appear to offer a prescriptive vision of techno-centric sustainability futures and ultimately fall short in critically engaging with the complex and often contradictory relationship between the ICT/telecoms industry, energy demands and the climate crisis.

The current vision for 6G as driven by organizations such as 6G-IA, 6G4Society, and the NGMN Alliance with a strong sustainability focus and SDG alignment and KVI integration, is welcome, but ethical and environmental needs, the existing metrics for achieving this, need to be radically reimagined. This reimagining requires the 6G R & D community collaborating with critical humanities and socio-technical researchers to study use cases from a context-led perspective, and to take a critical evidence-based approach to understanding the varied processes, practices, and parameters of 6G deployments to reassess their wider environmental, societal and economic impact. This type of multidisciplinary R & D could be instrumental in delivering much-needed reflection on the lessons learnt from previous iterations of next generation network technologies (as Klein and D’Ignazio (2024) ask in the case of data science and AI research from an intersectional feminist point of view).

A reimagined assessment model for 6G development also requires a deeper engagement with a wider diversity of stakeholders, to account for a wider array of perspectives across societal, environmental, and economic concerns. The existing use cases and KVIs are devised by technical groups and industry partners. But in order to have a more meaningful impact, they need to include those populations who will be directly affected by the deployments, for examples, workers in healthcare and operators in logistics and manufacturing industries or communities living close to 6G trials who might have concerns about electromagnetic radiation. To this end, the 6G R & D process would stand to benefit from integrating forms of pTA and cTA into the process.

Economic and geopolitical contexts as well as end-users and related institutions cannot be negated.

While the initiators of 6G technologies might imagine the technological aspect as taking center stage in the infrastructure’s rollout, in reality, the role of both the socio-cultural, economic and geopolitical contexts as well as those end-users and related institutions cannot be negated. Theoretically, 6G might offer a myriad of potential sustainability benefits. But in order to meaningfully develop and integrate 6G technologies, there needs to be a move away from rose-tinted optics of innovation-driven sustainability and efficiency, to a more contextual based understanding of how network technologies will have real life impact on established services and what the trade-offs might be. As other scholars studying the political economy of network technologies can attest to (Starosielski 2015; Appel et al. 2018; Ali 2021), this concerns not only the technical aspects of the applications but also how they become entangled in multiple interconnected and complex practices, processes and systems within different social-cultural and institutional contexts. This requires grounded empirical research into the direct and indirect impact of deployments, to understand the new arrangements between technologies and users. This also requires in-depth post-deployment analysis and evaluation of value added, value displaced, resultant trade-offs as well as grounded understandings of the challenges of cultural pushback and societal acceptance.