Digital technologies have the power to drive climate change mitigation by reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) across all sectors, deliver digital tools for climate adaptation and support climate monitoring and forecasting. At the same time, digitalization has an environmental impact. The growing demand for data centers, energy-intensive ICT equipment, and digital devices is contributing to a growing carbon and waste footprint. The ICT sector’s share in global GHG emissions - estimated between 2-4 per cent, comparable to the aviation industry – along with its rising energy consumption, has led to increasing international attention on how to measure and monitor its environmental impact.
Unlike sectors such as energy and transport, which benefit from well-established frameworks for emissions and energy tracking, reliable environmental data for the ICT sector remains largely unavailable. This data gap hampers evidence-based policymaking, regulatory oversight, international comparability, and climate accountability.
In line with its mandate, the ITU Development Sector has undertaken several initiatives to address this gap. This includes its flagship
Greening Digital Companies Report and
dashboard that use publicly available data from key ICT industry players to track digital company performance on emissions, energy and renewables, targets and climate commitments.
Current efforts to produce better data are focusing on developing a harmonized framework and set of national ICT environmental indicators that countries will collect from the ICT industry and report to ITU. A major step has been the establishment of the
Subgroup on National Greenhouse Gas Emission Monitoring Indicators by the ITU Expert Group on Telecommunication/ICT Indicators (EGTI), in 2024. This group builds on existing monitoring work done by countries such as France, across ITU and other international organizations. A
2024 survey was carried out amongst national statistical focal points to assess priorities and needs in ICT sector emissions monitoring. It highlighted that while interest in the topic is high, few countries currently monitor the climate impact of their national ICT sector.
The current framework, which covers the sub-sectors of telecom networks, data centers, and end-user device manufacturers, is being piloted in a number of countries in 2026, to assess its environmental relevance and feasibility in terms of data availability. The latter, in particular, remains a major challenge. This highlights the importance not only of harmonized indicators but also capacity building that will allow countries to progressively build their data collection capacity by focusing first on indicators that are both impactful and achievable, while planning for the gradual inclusion of more complex indicators over time.