In 2025, the French government allocated €1.6 billion to a call for tenders for major industrial decarbonization projects (AOGPID, 2026). Seven projects were selected, with the aim of reducing annual emissions by 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide from highly polluting plants. In the AOGPID milestone report of 13 February 2026, French Minister Roland Lescure states convincingly: “The decarbonization of French industry is not an option, it is a strategic necessity […]”. It is a scientific, technical, and economic challenge, as industry has been based on the combustion of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution (Aït el Hadj, 2024). Industrial decarbonization involves a major shift and a systemic transition. Supporting innovation in industrial decarbonization projects (IDPs) requires large-scale, consistent, and coherent public intervention, combining research and development support, investment subsidies, standardization, and environmental taxation. Beyond the news of the day, a key question remains: how should IDPs be conceived? We argue that systems theory and systems engineering offer relevant theoretical and practical insights in this domain.

IDPs can be conceived as instances of a generic entity called the technical object. For atomist theory, technical objects are particles moving in a vacuum, as are their potential buyers, selection criteria, and public actions. The associations between the atoms are both contingent, instantaneous, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. These associations can induce a phase transition if the following scenario is played out: potential buyers recognize a particular IDP as decisive, they amplify its promises in the media, speculate about it, they acquire it as quickly as possible, and, through a coalescence process, the entire industry suddenly shifts towards decarbonization. Atomism recommends encouraging this positive scenario by conditioning criteria potential buyers of IDPs have in mind. Technological atomism extends the theory of rational consumer choice to the technical, industrial and innovation domain.

Atomism acknowledges an ontological gap. The Earth is a physical, biological, and chemical system, namely the geosphere, but this does not apply to technical objects, the potential buyers and the public institutions. For proponents of Mario Bunge’s (1919-2020) “systemism” (2004), this gap is not acceptable. Either the universe and its constituents are systems, or none of them is not. It is inconsistent to acknowledge the existence of the geosphere while denying that of the “technosphere” and the “sociosphere” (Triclot, 2024). However, Bunge’s systemism is not a pure holism. Systemism conceives the structure of the universe as a mesh, a fiber network, and a hierarchy. One can separate out a technical object for analysis. However, understanding it and acting on it requires broadening his or her scope. This object under study must interact with external entities or processes related to the geosphere, technosphere, and sociosphere. These entities or processes shape the technical object of interest. In return, it must satisfy their constraints.

Let’s illustrate these abstract ideas with a very simple example. IDPs provide a service that produces a certain type and volume of tangible goods. To make this output effective, IDPs transform inputs—material, energy—and exchange data with other objects, software, or hardware, whether nearby or remote, in order to be controlled. IDPs operate because they are necessarily connected as nodes to a technical network (technosphere), as pointed out by theorists and practitioners of cyber-physical systems. IDPs are also located in space, they use natural resources and they can induce environmental effects (geosphere). Moreover, IDPs require complex supply chains, specific know how and complex organizations (sociosphere).

It is easy to understand how technological systemism extends our scope of analysis of technical objects, e.g. IDPs. Systemism also shifts our attention from the downstream phase of IDPs’ lifecycle to their upstream phase. Downstream, technical objects are concrete, ready-made, off-the-shelf solutions, with a brand, a set of property rights, price, instructions for use, etc. In the upstream phase of their lifecycle, they are an unique abstract entity called system. This unique system can be embodied in various concrete solutions developed in downstream design. Therefore, one can act on IDPs not only by conditioning their downstream relative activities, e.g., their purchase, but also by framing their upstream design. One can therefore use a relevant framework of reference developed after WW II, namely Systems Engineering (SE).

SE provides designers and their managers with a toolbox made of concepts, glossaries, processes, methods, best practices (BPs), standards, modeling techniques, schematics, software applications, and methodologies that enable the development of complicated, complex, critical, and expensive technical objects, such as weapons, spacecrafts, aircrafts, ships, cars, and large scientific equipment. As the active community of SE specialists advances its work, this toolbox is expanding and becoming more specialized. In the case of this article, the most interesting specialization of SE is Sustainable Systems Engineering (SSE), a term proposed in 1999 by Jason Levy, Keith Hipel, and Marc Kilgour. SSE covers upstream design, which is excluded from routine eco-design.