COP27 Tutorial on ITU Standards related to Green Digital Transformation

Good afternoon and let me add my welcome to this tutorial on ITU’s international standards related to green digital transformation, and the role of the ICT sector in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We are honoured to have His Excellency Mr Khaled El Attar, Deputy Minister for Administrative Development, Digital Transformation and Automation with us today and many thanks to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of Egypt for its collaboration in organizing this event. 

It is a pleasure to have this opportunity to speak, as it is one of my last events in ITU, and climate change has been one of my main interests since joining ITU, 16 years ago. In 2007 I published the first ITU Report on ICTs and Climate Change which at the time attracted a lot of skepticism – with many questioning the role of ICTs – and ITU! Now it is widely accepted that digital technology has an extremely important role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but of course with its greatly extended use, its own footprint has increased substantially.

Now, more than ever, we need to harness the power of digital technologies to drive climate change adaptation and mitigation, whilst at the same time making every effort to reduce the ICT sector's own footprint. ITU contributes to this effort by producing several standards to help the sector decrease its own emissions, whilst helping other sectors to reduce their emissions. This session will offer an opportunity to present some of these key international standards. 

One small but telling example of how the technology is contributing is that many of us today can attend COP27 remotely. In ITU we have greatly extended the use of remote participation in our meetings, spurred on by the COVID pandemic.

And many emerging technologies have great potential to help. Digital twins for example can reduce the energy consumption of buildings in construction, and operation. This is achieved by analysing many data sources such as heating, cooling, and lighting and bringing this, often-siloed data, into a single platform that enables its visualisation in real time with easy-to-use dashboards. This is significant as globally 39% of CO2 emissions come from buildings, 28% during operation. 

Today’s tutorial is an opportunity for participants to learn what is being achieved by ITU and the ICT sector, as well as gaining insights into how you can contribute to the process. ​

I am very pleased that we have two of ITU’s leading experts as speakers. Jean Manuel and Philippe have been stalwarts in ITU standards work for many years and ITU delegates to many COPs, so we have none better to speak to us. In ITU we are very fortunate to have over 900 sector members from telecom companies to Internet players to academia and civil society, and we rely very much on our private sector company experts to drive the ITU standards work.

So, without further ado let me pass back to our moderator, Mr. Mario Castro Grande, Senior External Affairs Officer at ITU, and wish you all a very fruitful tutorial. 

Thank you.​​