14th TIME Economic Forum
Warsaw, Poland
Opening Keynote
Green Digital Transformation
Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Director, ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau
7 March 2022
Good morning everyone.
It is a great honour to join so many distinguished colleagues at this important regional forum.
I'm Doreen Bogdan-Martin, and I serve as Director of Telecommunication Development, one of the top elected posts at ITU, the UN agency for digital technologies.
My brief is to bring together our 193 Member States; our 800 private sector members from the tech industry; and partners like the European Commission, the African Union, and other regional bodies, to develop and implement impactful strategies and initiatives aimed at 'connecting the world'.
It's a role that has taken on a new dimension in the wake of the global pandemic, as we witnessed the catastrophic repercussions faced by individuals and communities who lacked recourse to the fast, reliable and affordable connectivity those of us joining this session take for granted.
Many of the unconnected lost their jobs and incomes overnight. More than one billion children missed schooling because they lacked the devices and access to join online classes. Millions of small businesses failed. People without a connection could not get vital medical information. And social isolation and hardship spawned a mental health crisis that the world will be living with for many years to come.
New figures from ITU, released at the end of last year, estimate that 2.9 billion people across the planet remain totally unconnected.
But many of those who have borne the brunt of the pandemic are not those with no connection at all.
Of the 4.9 billion we count as 'connected', hundreds of millions struggle with infrequent access to poor quality, expensive connectivity that keeps them from leveraging the transformational power of digital.
Our challenge, as a global community, is to bridge that gaping 'connectivity chasm' so that everyone gets the chance to harness the power of digital platforms and services to improve their lives, and the lives of their families, and communities.
Tackling a challenge of this size and scale is not something we can do alone.
More than ever before, partnership, collaboration and cooperation need to be at the very heart of every nation's digital transformation strategy.
And more than ever before, when we set about designing and deploying those strategies, we need to put people and planet front and centre of our efforts.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently spoke of the need to ensure that it is people who drive technology, and not technology that drives people.
A more human-centric approach to digital development will prioritize systems that seek to enrich people's lives over those that merely seek to monopolize their attention.
And a more planet-centric approach will mean harnessing digital tools to minimize our carbon footprint, while better managing the way we develop, use and renew those tools, so that our growing digital economy makes a positive and powerful contribution to the fight against climate change.
ITU has been working to promote a greener vision of our digital future for well over a decade.
Our green e-government partnership with Germany's GIZ seeks to maximize the sustainability benefits of government digitalization by helping countries deploy sustainable digital government services that are cashless, presence-less and paperless, and to measure and assess their ongoing environmental impact.
Recognizing that digital development presents its own risks and sustainability challenges through increased electricity and resource consumption, this project provides best-practice guidance on reducing digital energy consumption; encourages the adoption of greener technologies for government data centres; and promotes the use of renewable energy sources, and 're-use-repair-and-recycle' models.
And because e-waste is emerging as an increasingly urgent global issue, ITU actively advocates for globally-agreed regulation to promote a circular electronics value chain, where we conserve our precious resources and progressively reduce the carbon footprint of the digital sector.
Latest figures from the Global E-waste Monitor we publish annually with our partners, show that more than 53 million tonnes of e-waste were generated in just one year – yet only 17% of that waste is currently collected and recycled.
We need to work more closely to harmonize measurement methodologies, boost the capacity of national statistics offices to measure e-waste levels, consider setting targets for e-waste collection and recycling, and support countries to regulate e-waste.
Right now, only 40% of countries are covered by national e-waste policy, regulation or legislation.
The result is that there is little official management of this waste stream globally.
Data is key for developing sound regulation, and sound regulation is key to safeguarding the environment, society and human health. We can – and must – do better.
Excellencies, colleagues,
ITU membership will be addressing these and other major challenges facing our planet in June at our World Telecommunication Development Conference, where our Member States, sector members and partners will come together to draw up the next global blueprint for digital development.
Coming at a time when access to digital technologies has never mattered more, and when managing those technologies, and their impact on our planet, has never been more critical, this next WTDC is our opportunity to use digital to create 'the world we want'.
In the lead-up to this landmark event, ITU is about to open its new Partner2Connect Digital Coalition Pledging Platform, which will garner connectivity commitments from members, partners and new stakeholders from around the world.
Those commitments will be showcased through our P2C Digital Coalition Roundtable programme, where participants will get the chance to share their ideas and strategies to accelerate digital inclusion, and to forge new alliances that help push connectivity out to the world's hardest-to-reach communities.
I hope all of you will join me in Kigali, Rwanda, from June 6-16, so that, together, we can harness the power and potential of ICTs to create a fairer, and greener, world.
Thank you.
