Keynote Address - GeSI/Deutsche Telekom COP 23 Event

Keynote Address - GeSI/Deutsche Telekom COP 23 Event 

Further, faster, together: The vital role of ICTs in Mitigating and adapting to climate change

14 November 2017, Bonn, Germany

Good morning. I would like to thank GeSI and  Deutsche Telekom for inviting me to speak to you here this morning.

Just a few weeks ago the World Meteorological Organization announced that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the highest for 800,000 years. 

This comes at a cost. Extreme weather events are happening with increasing frequency. Today, people are still recovering from the wildfires that raged across Northern California, the hurricanes that struck the Caribbean, and the mudslides that hit Sierra Leone. Last year, natural disasters affected 445 million people across the world. Thousands of lives were lost.

And then there’s the economic cost. According to the World Bank, natural disasters cost the global economy $520 billion a year, pushing 24 million people into poverty each year. 

Too often it is the poorest who are hardest hit.
So what can technology do about it? And in particular how can information and communication technologies (ICTs) be part of the solution?
Let me take this opportunity to explain what ITU has been doing to green the ICT Sector, and what in turn the sector is doing to help mitigate and adapt to climate change.

When I first joined ITU almost 11 years ago, climate change did not really figure in ITU’s work.
So when I published ITU’s report entitled “ICTs and Climate Change” in December 2007,  the overwhelming reaction was: what have ICTs got to do with climate change; and, why is ITU getting involved in the issue?

What that first report said - and what ITU highlighted for the first time at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali that month - is that, although we recognize that ICTs are a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, more importantly ICTs are an important element in mitigating and adapting to climate change, and reducing overall GHG emissions.   

This is a message we have brought to successive COPs since, very often in association with GeSI, supported by industry members in particular Deutsche Telekom, which is why I am happy to be here with you today to explore how we can move forward: further, faster, together!

It was not easy at first to get this message across to the negotiators, who were primarily from environment ministries unfamiliar with the technology and its capabilities, but we persevered and I believe we contributed to today’s recognition of the important role of ICTs.
Since Bali, of course the ICT sector has experienced very high growth, and consequently its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions has grown, but so has its impact on reducing overall GHG emissions.

The number of mobile subscriptions, for example, has risen from 2.75 billion then to almost 7.75 billion now. And the number of devices connected to the Internet by 2020 is projected to reach 50 billion.

ITU, recognizing that because of its exponential growth it is very difficult for the ICT sector to reduce its carbon footprint, adopted in 2014 a target to reduce emissions per ICT device – that is by 30% by 2020.

As the former Director of ITU’s Standardization Bureau, I know firsthand what impact standards can have on reducing emissions.
Think of the charger for mobiles, laptops and other portable devices, for instance, and how much these small power supplies - but billions of them around the world - contribute to increasing the consumption of energy over their entire life cycle.

That’s why ITU approved environmentally friendly standards for universal chargers for mobiles, laptops and other portable devices that can reduce no-load power consumption five times compared with the norm. Also, since these standards introduced standardized connections, they lead to significant reductions in e-waste, at a time when one million tons of external power supplies are manufactured every year.

All ITU standards now give serious attention to reducing the energy consumption of devices and services, this includes significant examples such as the energy consumption of data centres, and the sustainable power feeding solutions for future 5G networks.
ITU’s membership of 193 governments, 450 private sector companies, 150 universities, civil society and other regional and international organizations all place great importance on this work. 

Most significantly, ITU maintains the international treaty on the use of the radio spectrum and satellite orbits. This is to ensure their efficient use, harmonizing worldwide spectrum allocations and coordinating the use of satellite orbits to prevent them interfering with each other and with terrestrial services, or colliding into each other! This together with ITU’s technical standards reduces the cost of ICT devices and services as a result of economies of scale, and ensures they can operate across borders even when offered  by different manufacturers and service providers.

Take smart cities, for example. In today’s cities much of the infrastructure is installed by a diverse set of suppliers and maintained by different agencies that have traditionally worked separately. They now have to work together.

City planners, utilities and technology providers need international standards to achieve efficient, cost-effective and scalable levels of performance and quality to create smart cities. And that’s where ITU contributes.

But ITU cannot do this alone, we need partners. And that is why ITU launched the “United for Smart Sustainable Cities” initiative to partner with 16 other UN agencies and programmes. Information on this is on display at the “One UN for Climate Action” stand in the Bonn zone at COP23.

The 21st century will be the era of cities - big cities. By 2050, nearly 70 percent of the world’s population is predicted to live in urban areas.  It is creating huge challenges that will require the application of the technology for transportation, health, education, buildings and governance.

But we should also use the technology to help people living in rural areas to be more productive and sustainable, so that they do not feel the need to move into cities. What is needed is smart villages! This means that we need to bring connectivity to the rural areas, something that is commercially challenging. However, innovative solutions are in sight with several projects underway, such as low earth orbiting satellites and high altitude platforms. All these will need to be coordinated by ITU and will need to comply with ITU standards.

ITU also helps ensure that our Member States understand how to take advantage of the huge opportunities that ICTs have for social, economic and environmentally sustainable development, as well as for disaster warning, mitigation, response and recovery. To assist with disaster recovery, ITU deploys emergency satellite terminals immediately in the wake of natural disasters, such as the recent Hurricane Irma, and many others. 

The people who survive these disasters are often left with nothing. They’ve lost their homes, their crops, their dignity.
Sometimes they have no choice but to leave everything behind. The UN Refugee Agency reports that on average 21.5 million people are forcibly displaced by weather-related disasters each year.

Access to financial services and financial literacy are essential for people to recover from these disasters.
Saving accounts, for example, can help people use funds acquired during better times to cover harder times.
But what do you do when you don’t have a bank account?
Today, more than 2 billion adults do not have a formal bank account, most of them in developing economies. But of these, 1.6 billion have access to a mobile phone.

That is why ITU launched a global partnership with the World Bank Group, the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to accelerate digital financial inclusion in developing countries through the use of mobile phones.

Another partnership launched by ITU is with WMO and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO to study how submarine telecommunication cables could be used as sensors for climate monitoring and threats from tsunamis.  We call upon the private sector and other key stakeholders to join in this endeavor.

We need partnerships such as these to make projects a reality, and especially public-private partnerships.

Only by collaborating together will we move climate action - and all the other UN Sustainable Development Goals - from vision to action, and transform the digital revolution into a development revolution. All the various players need to bring their own specific competencies to the table, avoid duplication of effort, and pool their resources to meet the common good.

As the GeSI Smarter2030 report shows, by the year 2030 ICTs have the potential to hold global CO2 emissions to the 2015 level, and reduce our consumption of scarce resources. 

Smart cities. Smart villages. Climate monitoring. Digital financial inclusion. Emergency telecommunications. These are all areas where information and communication technologies can make a big difference. But only if the power of ICTs is brought to all nations, all people and all segments of society.

Let us continue our efforts to advocate the vital role of information and communication technologies in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

ITU looks forward to continuing this effort with GeSI and Deutsche Telekom, and to playing our part in helping save the planet.

Thank you very much.