ICT industry faces up to climate change challenges

Good practices by ICT companies in responding to climate change and the challenges facing the sector were the two key talking points of a recent roundtable hosted by Two Tomorrows in partnership with The Guardian newspaper.

Examining the broad topic of technology and climate change, the event brought together senior managers from leading ICT and media companies as well as academics.

Delegates explored initiatives the technology sector is implementing to mitigate climate change and how this can help the media sector reduce its own impacts.

At the conclusion of discussions, delegates recognised the potential benefits of technology companies working together with users of their products and services (including consumers and the media industry) as well as companies in their supply chain to reduce carbon impact.

The event included presentations by:

• Elvin Ozensoy, Tomorrow’s Value Rating research manager at Two Tomorrows
• Emma Fryer, Head of Climate Change Programmes of Intellect, the ICT trade body
• Dr Chris Preist from the University of Bristol, leader of the SYMPACT project to assess how digital technology could transform the newspaper industry and the likely impact on energy use and climate change.

The ensuing discussions, under Chatham House Rules, were facilitated by Dave Knight, group director, Two Tomorrows.

Best practices in the ICT sector

Delegates were introduced to highlights of recent Tomorrow’s Value Ratings of the world’s largest ICT and Silicon Valley companies.

These ratings revealed that some of the best corporate sustainability practices are now coming out of the ICT sector. Examples of promising product and service developments in ICT include:

• Vodafone’s M-PESA, a mobile payment service in use in Africa, and its Machine to Machine (M2M) applications
• Ebay’s social entrepreneurship initiatives
• IBM’s Power to Innovate initiative
• France Telecom’s environmental product labelling.

Some of these examples – and many others in the sector – point to companies increasingly recognising the commercial opportunity that lies in helping other sectors reduce their carbon footprint.

However, the Tomorrow’s Value Ratings found little evidence of systematic integration of sustainability principles and practices in the sector.

The ratings also showed that, although companies have implemented various initiatives to increase energy efficiency of products and data centres, the majority are struggling to demonstrate significant carbon emission reductions against targets. Panasonic is a notable exception to this rule, having achieved a reduction in its absolute emissions.

Expert panellists agreed that ICT companies are improving their management of emissions from their operations, but there is still a lack of consistent measurement of emissions resulting from product use. Participants contended that too much focus is given to issues such as reducing energy use in the standby phase. While progress in this area was applauded, delegates argued that the use phase is much more important overall.

Future trends, challenges and opportunities

Key climate change trends and opportunities for the sector discussed at the roundtable included:

• The need for a comprehensive lifecycle assessment (LCA) of digital product and services, such as downloadable music, e-books and online news, to enable comparison with the carbon impacts of conventional alternatives. As assumptions on circumstances can play a massive role in LCAs, there is a need to establish common approaches and standards for measurement.
• The changing use of devices, and how dematerialisation of many products has put an increasing emphasis on understanding how devices are actually used.
• Understanding how to encourage users only to download what they need and to adapt technology to deliver fewer bytes of only the most useful information.

• Many devices now have exceptional functionality, enough to meet most user requirements for many years. However, fashion is still driving demand and product churn. Ways need to be found to mitigate the climate change impacts this is having.

The next step: A cross-sector working group

The next step for ICT and media companies could be to initiate a cross-sector working group to establish a common understanding around the measurement of carbon and other impacts during the use phase. We would be pleased to hear from those interested in such an initiative. Please contact elvin.ozensoy@twotomorrows.com.

Tomorrow’s Value Rating results

More about the key sustainability issues facing the ICT sector