For Europe, Digitization and Sustainability Go Hand in Hand

Thoughts about technology that is inclusive, trusted, and creates a more sustainable world

These posts represent my personal views on the future of the digital economy powered by the cloud and artificial intelligence. Unless otherwise indicated, they do not represent the official views of Microsoft.

?Can we hope that something good will come out of the COVID-19 crisis? Many are asking this question today. The first answer that comes to mind of course points to our swiftly expanding scientific knowledge of the malady and how to treat it or, better yet, prevent it. There is no doubt that extraordinarily rapid progress is being made, both on the vaccine front, where multiple contenders are in advanced clinical trials, and on the therapeutics front, where monoclonal antibodies are showing great promise.

Another answer concerns digital transformation. I’ve written many times in this blog about all the ways that the digitization of our business processes as well as of our personal and work lives has lessened the economic and social damage inflicted by the pandemic.

But there is still another answer that I want to focus on today. It is the affirmation that COVID-19 will spur us to move faster to address the dangers of global warming caused by human greenhouse gas emissions. The idea here is that as we emerge from one grave crisis it is natural to think harder about how we might ward off another that is already coming into view.

This association between digital transformation and the fight against global warming may be surprising to some readers. It is something one hears increasingly often in Europe these days, but not as frequently in the United States, at least not yet. Even before the pandemic began, the European Union had already placed the link between these two ideas at the center of its strategy for the future growth of the European economy. In early March the European Commission announced what it called “a new Industrial Strategy for a globally competitive, green and digital Europe.” The strategy report reiterated Europe’s pledge to become climate neutral by 2050 and to make digital transformation the key to attaining this goal.

Now, as the EU prepares its COVID-19 recovery plan, it is doubling down on its strategy of “digitalisation as an enabler for decarbonisation.” In her September European State of the Union address, EC President Ursula von der Leyen promised:

“A world where we use digital technologies to build a healthier, greener society.”

She pledged that the majority of the EC’s ambitious 750 billion euro COVID-19 recovery plan, known as NextGenerationEU, will be dedicated to this goal, with 37% going to the European Green Deal and 20% to investments in cloud, AI, broadband connectivity, 5G, and supercomputers. The result, she said, will be to make the next ten years “Europe's Digital Decade.”

How exactly will digital transformation help reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Here are several examples mentioned in the EC’s Industrial Strategy report:

• By tracking when and where electricity is most needed, we can increase energy efficiency and burn less oil or coal.
• With data gathered from devices connected through the Internet of Things, processes in construction and industry can be streamlined to use fewer resources.
• Likewise, products can be digitized and transformed into services to cut wasteful overproduction. For example, rather than selling lightbulbs, a company could sell a subscription that guarantees a building will be lighted.

In short, digitization will help achieve green goals by wiring up all of the processes in our industrial societies that consume energy or produce greenhouse gases, pooling the vast amounts of data thus gathered in the cloud, then letting AI and other powerful analytical tools tell us how to do more with less—more goods and services produced for a world still hungry for improved standards of living for all, but with far less energy wasted and little or no greenhouse gases emitted.

Of course, a cloud provider that operates a vast global network of data centers full of powerful computers running on electricity must also do its part. That’s why Microsoft pledged earlier this year to make its global operations not merely carbon neutral but carbon negative by the year 2030. That means that in ten years we will actually be taking more carbon out of the atmosphere than we put in.

But returning to the question of the positive consequences that might come from COVID-19, I would like to close again this week by citing a very interesting comment recently made by my colleague Casper Klynge, Microsoft’s VP for European Government Affairs:

“If you had asked me six or seven months ago whether COVID-19 was going to do good things for sustainability, I wouldn’t have known what to say. But now in October 2020, we’ve seen that COVID-19 has been a catalyst by leading us to focus both on digitalization and sustainability. You’ve seen a number of companies around the world including Microsoft saying we shouldn’t lose sight of the next crisis even while we are in the middle of a global pandemic. This is one of the few positive things you can say about COVID-19, that it has led to greater focus on the combination of digitalization and sustainability.”

Bringing the power of digital transformation to bear on the problem of climate change is one of the biggest tasks facing our civilization. It will be the task not just of the current decade, but no doubt of decades to come after that. While we will never look back on COVID-19 as something positive, perhaps we will say one day that it led us to think more deeply about the challenges facing our planet. And that will be a good thing.