G20 blind to the benefits of ICT?

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 29 September 2009 12:17

IT Industry - Strategy

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is to press the upcoming Copenhagen Agreement to recognise the importance of information and communication technologies as a cross-sectoral tool to combat climate change.

The move was announced during what ITU says was the first ever Virtual International Symposium on ICTs and Climate Change and follows concerns expressed by at least two leading IT companies - Ericsson and Cisco - that IT was being given scant attention by the G20 in its debates on both climate change and the global financial crisis.

In May, Ericsson's president and CEO, Carl-Henric Svanberg, releasing the company's annual Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Report, said: "We would like to see ICT and telecom on the agenda for the global climate negotiations in Copenhagen later this year...During 2008, our technology has been used around the globe to reduce energy consumption and the corresponding CO2 emissions, demonstrating our firm belief that telecommunications is both an essential part of the equation in solving global climate change and critical to the development of more carbon-lean societies."

A month earlier, Cisco published a white paper in which it claimed that "throughout several hundred pages of publicly available reports produced to support the G20 Summit [on the global financial crisis] - from the EU, FSA, UN, US Treasury and G20 working groups - there is not a single mention of the role technology could play in supporting the new [global financial] system."

According to its web site the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen conference, to be held in December will be the culmination of "a crucial year in the international effort to address climate change" and a gathering at which the nations of the world will agree "to shape an ambitious and effective international response to climate change."

The ITU symposium, hosted jointly with the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), "heralds a new - and green - era of international events, offering many of the benefits of physical participation without the environmental costs," according to the ITU. Over 500 people participated from around 50 countries, with speakers and moderators from China, India, the Republic of Korea, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam.

ITU says it has been very active in negotiations to promote the important role that ICTs can play in mitigating and adapting to climate change. As the UN specialised agency for ICTs, ITU is also participating in meetings in Bangkok and Barcelona where preparation of the Copenhagen Agreement is taking place, in order to have the critical importance of ICTs recognised in the final text.

And UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon has underlined ITU's role in meeting the challenge of climate change, saying: "ITU is one of the very important stakeholders in the area of climate change."

The ITU launched a major initiative in 2008 to better understand the relationship between ICTs and climate change, with global symposia and work cutting across all sectors. The ITU's Telecommunication Standardisation Sector (ITU-T) has recently pioneered an internationally agreed methodology for calculating the impact of ICTs on greenhouse gas emissions over their entire life cycle.

The ITU says, "The newly-formed ITU-T Study Group 5 on 'Environment and Climate Change' is converting this methodology into a formal global standard. In addition, before work on any new standard in ITU is started an environmental check list is applied, to ensure that equipment and services that are built to ITU standards are truly green."

ITU's Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) is meanwhile focusing on monitoring and advanced remote sensing systems for better climate information. This was the subject of a recent joint seminar with the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) on the use of radio spectrum for meteorology, aimed at weather, water and climate monitoring and prediction. And through its Development Sector (ITU-D), ITU says it is supporting actions by developing countries to slow the growth of their emissions with capacity building exercises demonstrating the critical role of ICTs.