It’s time for a Green Revolution for your organization’s IT

It’s 10:00 AM BST May 25, 2030 in a small village just outside Great Yarmouth, UK and you’ve just enjoyed your second coffee of the day while keeping an eye on your company’s mission-critical supply chain management system. First implemented at the end of 2021, it was one of the main strategic solutions to significantly cut your company’s CO2 emissions by minimizing movements of products. Letting your gaze drift across the beautiful Broads, you reminisce about how surprised you were when you first learned of the unintended consequences of IT. It’s a good thing you did, and that you considered all aspects, as that ensured that you minimized your CO2 footprint across all aspects.  

Great Yarmouth by 2030

The latest predictions state that if we continue as is, our planet will have heated up by another 1C–2C by the turn of the century. In its fifth assessment report (2013), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated how much sea levels are likely to rise in the twenty-first century based on different levels of greenhouse gas emissions. The report noted that “...If countries make rapid cuts to emissions (the RCP2.6 scenario), the IPCC deems it likely that the sea level will rise by 26–55 cm (10–22 in) with a 67% confidence interval. If emissions remain very high, the IPCC projects sea level will rise by 52–98 cm (20–39 in).”

For towns like Great Yarmouth, which sits firmly within the Norfolk Broads, a one-meter sea level rise would leave vast swathes of land under water.

The Great Opportunity

However, it does not have to be this way. We can reverse the trend and stop global warming. For instance, the UN has calculated that IT can reduce global carbon emissions by 30% by 2030 and, as noted in our report “Fit for Net-Zero,” there are at least 55 technologies that can accelerate Europe’s economic recovery and transformation.

Today’s IT CO2 footprint

Enterprise IT contributes significantly to the world’s carbon footprint. For instance, in 2019, 53.6 million tons of e-waste were generated worldwide – an increase of 21% in five years.[1] Global IT accounts for ~2–3% of global CO2 emissions (some suggest even more.) This may not sound like much, but it’s on a par with the aviation industry’s emissions from fuel in 2018.

So, ICT already has a sustainability issue, but it’s likely to get a lot worse as data volumes snowball in the coming decade. Every byte requires energy to generate and manipulate. Today, global IT accounts for about 10% of global electricity demand, but that’s expected to rise to 20%. Then, there is the number of connected devices, which is expected to reach 55.7 billion by 2025. Moreover, 75% of these devices will be connected to an IoT platform, which, in turn, will lead to a fourfold growth in data, from 18 zettabytes[2] in 2019 to 73 zettabytes by 2025.[3]

If these predictions are correct, and the industry does nothing to mitigate the situation, global IT could contribute 20% of global CO2 emissions within the next 10–15 years. That’s more than global road transport which today contributes ~18%.

The Big Challenge

Despite the significant increase in wider awareness and actions to reverse global warming (an increasing numbers of organizations across all sectors have a clear net-zero strategy), focusing on a sustainable IT is not a priority for most organizations. Based on our Research “Sustainable IT”, only 43% of executives say they are aware of their organization’s IT footprint and 50% of firms say they have an enterprise-wide sustainability strategy, but only 18% have a comprehensive sustainable IT strategy with well-defined goals and target timelines. Today, the adoption and deployment of solutions is undermined by a lack of tools and expertise: 49% say a major challenge, when it comes to implementing sustainable IT initiatives, is the lack of tools or standards/ratings to evaluate the carbon footprint of IT and 53% say they do not have the required expertise for sustainable IT implementation.

As a result, organizations are missing out on a significant performance opportunity. Only 6% of the organizations in our survey can be classified as highly mature when it comes to sustainable IT and 61% of those highly mature companies have improved their ESG (environmental, social and governance) score and brand image with 56% having improved customer satisfaction.

The Way Forward

To give sustainable IT the attention it deserves, organizations need to understand the carbon cost of our digital world and accelerate the move to sustainable systems. They need the diagnostic tools, a clear strategy, and a roadmap for sustainable IT performance.

The solution design process must consider sustainability aspects. Much as we consider performance, availability, and cost, sustainability must form an integral part of the solution design process ensuring that sourcing, operation, and disposal of any IT equipment does not directly or indirectly imperil economic, social, and environmental aspects. As an example, Capgemini modernized a premium automotive manufacturer’s application landscape to accelerate its transition to a carbon-neutral enterprise. In this case, we managed to reduce the CO2 footprint by 50%.

Another aspect that has yet to be fully considered is the structure of non-production environments. Today, it is typical to have a development, functional test, system integration test, training, user acceptance, and operational test environment for every production environment. Often, there is also a full-sized disaster recovery environment that operates in parallel to the live production environment. Considering sustainability, quality, and availability will create opportunities to reduce the number of required environments to reduce some of the unintended CO2 footprint as well as other sustainability-related aspects.

Conclusion

Back to Great Yarmouth, 2030; you look back to the technology solutions you deployed to ensure your company’s net-zero targets were achieved: measuring your footprint, setting a clear strategy, and addressing the sustainability aspect were all important. However, the critical part of it all was rather simple: taking IT sustainability seriously. 

[1] United Nations institute for Training and Research, “GLOBAL E-WASTE SURGING: UP 21 PERCENT IN 5 YEARS,” July 2, 2020

[2] 1 billion hard drives, with each having 1 terabyte, would equal 1 zettabyte

[3] IDC, “IoT Growth Demands Rethink of Long-Term Storage Strategies, says IDC,” July 27, 2020.