GREEN BY APP: THE CONTRIBUTION OF MOBILE APPLICATIONS TO ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

Environmental sustainability is an important field in both research and practice. Governments and enterprises expend huge amounts of money and effort in attempting to reach their environmental goals, e.g., resource efficiency or the reduction of CO2 emissions. In the information systems (IS) community, the research field of Green IS has recently emerged, examining the potential of IS to foster environmental sustainability. In this paper, we focus on the capacity of mobile applications to support environmental concerned measures by performing a classification of existing mobile apps in the Google Play store. The goal of this explorative paper is to structure findings regarding the application of sustainable mobile apps from theory and practice in the domain of Green IS and to create an avenue for further detailed research on this matter. Therefore, we examine three research questions based on Green IS theory and the results of an extensive app store analysis. The article discovers suitable domains for the private use of sustainable mobile apps and discusses the adequacy of established Green IS roles from the business domain. Furthermore, the connections between applications and user goals are discussed in terms of motivational and acceptance-related factors of user engagement