Speech by Malcolm Johnson, ITU Deputy Secretary-General
Momentum for Change: ICT Solutions Event : Speech
09 December 2015, Paris, France
Distinguished Colleagues,
I am pleased to participate today in this high-level segment on ICT Solutions.
Nothing defines our era better than Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). As of 2015, there are more than 7 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, increased from 738 million in 2000. Globally, 3.2 billion people are using the Internet, of which two billion live in developing countries.
ICTs are in all walks of life, are vital to social and economic develop, and play an essential role in mitigating and adapting to climate change.
Applied in most sectors of an economy, ICT's potential to combat climate change lies chiefly in its ability to reduce the carbon footprint of high energy-consuming sectors: energy generation; waste disposal; building construction and transportation.
ICTs can manage smart buildings that power themselves, and smart grids allow energy to be fed back into the electricity grid. They can better manage water distribution and intelligent transport systems can reduce congestion and pollution.
Intelligent ambient lighting will come on only when and where it's needed. Public transport will respond more efficiently to customer needs by analyzing demand through big data gathered from mobile phones. Autonomous vehicles will substantially reduce accidents and deaths on the road.
Urban broadband access for everyone will help to create a level playing field of opportunities for the underprivileged. Teleworking will increase also help reduce urban congestion and enabling more flexible and efficient working conditions and improved work/life balance.
International standards for climate change mitigation and adaption, environmentally friendly and energy saving technologies, energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emission accounting and verification, will provide a firm foundation for designers, architects, engineers, developers and government authorities to create sustainable living environments. International standards are essential to ensure interoperability of services and products and to reduce costs through economies of scale.
ITU has developed a set of standardized methodologies for estimating the emissions from the ICT sector and how much total greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced through the application of ICTs in the polluting sectors such as energy generation, transportation, waste disposal, and building construction. ITU's technical standards are designed to ensure energy efficient solutions, such as the universal charger for mobile devices, which is able to save an estimated 13.6m tonnes of CO2 and 82,000 tonnes of redundant chargers, every year. No more drawers full of redundant chargers!
Apart from the mitigation activities, there are a growing number of examples of ICTs being used to help countries adapt to climate change. Examples include remote sensing for monitoring of natural disasters such as floods and tidal waves, improved communications to help deal with such natural disasters more effectively, and satellite and surface-based remote sensors for environmental observation and providing data for climate change prediction and local forecasts and warnings.
ICTs have a tremendous potential to address the challenges of climate change, and the challenges of the sustainable development goals including Goal 13 which relates to combat climate change and its impacts.
To take advantage of this opportunity we must all work together. Coordination and collaboration amongst the various UN agencies involvement will be essential to avoid duplication of effort, and allow a pooling of recourses. But the public sector also needs to work closely with the private sector, academia and civil society. In ITU we are lucky that these are all members of ITU and as such we would like to offer a platform to facilitate the ongoing global discussion on how "smart" use of ICTs will contribute to the efforts to combat climate change. This is something ITU has been advocating in several of these climate change conferences, together with the private sector especially our partner GeSI. I believe that largely thanks to these efforts, and events like this, the Paris Agreement will give due recognition of the importance of the technology to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
Thank you.