​Beijing, China, 22 September 2014

Opening Address

Ms. Zhao Yonghong, Deputy Director General of International Cooperation, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT)
Ms. Dai Xiaohui, Deputy Director General of Science and Technology, MIIT
Mr. Zhang Xingguo, President, Beijing Research Institute, Huawei
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen

Good morning. It is a great pleasure to be here in Beijing to welcome you all to the fourth ITU Green Standards Week.

I would like to begin by thanking Huawei, our host for this event, as well as our co-organizer, the China Academy of Telecommunication Research, especially Zhang Xia of CATR, Meng Fantao of Huawei and Xiao Li, Vice Chairman of ITU-T Study Group 5 for their great help.

This is the first Green Standards Week to be hosted outside Europe, and I am sure this week’s event will mark a major step forward in establishing it as a regular feature of ITU’s calendar of important annual events. Like many ITU-T initiatives I hope it will become an ITU wide event in the future and I am pleased that we have a colleague here from ITU’s Regional Office in Bangkok together with Cristina Bueti of TSB. I particularly welcome participation from some of ITU’s Academy members.

Ladies and gentlemen

We are living in a world of rapid technological change with new innovations coming almost weekly.

This has been instigated by three main technological developments: personal computing; the development and widespread adoption of the Internet; and the explosion of mobile-wireless communications.

There has been a dramatic shift in global trade and the economic power from the West to East; and recognition of climate change as the single largest challenge facing our future as a society.

China is a central player in all these developments and alongside the US it has the power to shape the global sustainable development agenda.

The clean energy deals that China signed with the US in July this year represent a major milestone in the global efforts to curb climate change.

It is most encouraging to hear from Ms Zhao and Ms Dai the extent to which China’s sustainability strategy hinges around the application of ICTs to reduce the environmental footprint of other industry sectors.

These goals align with those of ITU, and China has become a crucial contributor to ITU’s work.

ITU is the UN agency for ICTs. It manages global radiofrequency spectrum and allocates satellite orbits; it strives to increase access to ICTs for underserved communities; it develops international technical standards to ensure interconnection and interoperability; and it helps build the enabling policy and regulatory environment to harness the benefit of the technology for sustainable development.

Convergence has become a dominant theme in the work of the ITU, it represents a significant standardization challenge, and what is becomingly increasingly important is the development of ICT standards for the vertical sectors such as transportation, health and energy.

ICTs must themselves become more environmentally efficient, but they also have a central role to play in decreasing the environmental impact of other industry sectors.

This is now becoming well understood, but that took years of advocacy, including ITU’s participation in the UN climate change conferences, in order to gain this recognition.

It has been one of my main objectives since I started as Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau in 2007. The first ITU “ICT and Climate Change Symposium” was held in Kyoto in 2008, followed by the creation of a Focus Group on the subject, and the adoption of a Resolution at the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly in Johannesburg in 2008, and then the establishment of a study group on ICT, Environment and Climate Change – ITU-T Study Group 5.

I am pleased that ITU’s work in this field has been a great success.

ITU-T has reviewed all of its existing standards to assess their environmental impact, and now energy saving and minimizing greenhouse gas emissions is a key consideration in the development of all new ITU-T standards.

A difficulty in quantifying the value of ICTs in reducing greenhouse gas emissions was the lack of an internationally recognised methodology to assess the environmental impacts of ICTs and their potential to reduce emissions in other industry sectors.

So the development of an international methodology was the first main effort. This has been followed by a range of green standards: intelligent transport systems and the smart grid, two sectors known to be major contributors to carbon emissions; guidance on how to reduce the environmental impact of ICTs over their entire lifecycle; best practices that are capable of halving a data centre’s energy consumption; standards for universal chargers; and methods to recycle the rare-metal components of ICT devices.

These will all be addressed over the course of this week.

The effectiveness of standards is closely linked with their worldwide adoption, so ITU-T works closely with the ITU Development Sector in bridging the standardization gap as well as assisting countries in implementing the standards.

Green Standards Weeks have stimulated this work, and they initiated three topics on the agenda this week: e-waste; the ITU/WMO/UNESCO-IOC Joint Task Force on Green Cable Systems; and ‘Smart Sustainable Cities’. Another important item on the week’s agenda is human exposure to electromagnetic fields, and it is good to hear from Mr Zhang how much work Huawei is doing in this area.

So finally let me thank again our host Huawei and co-organiser CATR, and all our excellent moderators and expert speakers who I am sure are going to make this a memorable week.

I wish you all a most enjoyable and rewarding event. Thank you