Digitalisation and Decarbonisation: Perspectives of Data Centre Development
Event details
York for Life Sustainability Network webinar
York for Life Sustainability Network is delighted to present a presentatiom as part of York Sustainability Week 2026.
As the UK accelerates its ‘twin transition’ toward global leadership in digitalisation and decarbonisation, data centres have emerged as critical infrastructure, central to economic strategy and climate innovation, yet carrying a substantial environmental footprint of their own. This seminar explores how the expansion of data centres intersects with regional development priorities, climate goals, and sustainability imperatives. Drawing on comparative insights from international case studies, Felicia examines the economic, technological, and environmental trade-offs behind data centre development and identifies key governance and policy challenges shaping the sector’s future.
The session outlines five interrelated dimensions: technology, policy and regulation, finance, infrastructure, and people, through which data centres can be steered towards more sustainable and resilient pathways. It highlights opportunities for data centre operators, users, investors and policymakers to align regional growth strategies with the low-carbon transition of the digital economy, and to position the data centre sector as a cornerstone of a smarter, greener, and more balanced national infrastructure.
About the speaker
Dr Felicia Liu is an economic geographer whose research focuses on how economies navigate transitions and challenges in the Anthropocene. Her current research explores how the rise of FinTech is reshaping economic production and climate resilience, examining the economic and environmental implications of the infrastructural backbone of the digital economy. Her work considers how these material infrastructures of FinTech are redistributing energy demand, reshaping geographies of capital, and transforming the environmental footprint of global finance. Building on her PhD research on the development of sustainable finance in Asia, Felicia also investigates new modalities of sustainable investment enabled by FinTech, including innovative instruments for biodiversity and nature finance, and the evolving data and disclosure practices that support them.
Prior to joining the University of York as Lecturer in 2023, Felicia held a joint appointment at the University of Oxford as Junior Research Fellow in Geography at Jesus College and Research Associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. She obtained her doctorate in Geography in 2022, jointly awarded by King’s College London and the National University of Singapore, and her thesis won the Global Network on Financial Geography Doctoral Dissertation Prize 2022. She also holds an MA in Climate Change (Distinction with Geography Department Prize, King’s College London), and BA in International Politics (First class, King’s College London).