SMART 2020 for the Mobile Sector

Vodafone and Accenture has produced a new report on the role that mobile communications can play in reducing carbon emissions. The report concludes that there is an opportunity to reduce emissions in Europe by 2.4% by 2020. Compare this with last year’s SMART 2020 report from the Climate Group and GeSi (and to which BT was a contributor), which showed that the ICT sector as a whole had the opportunity to reduce emissions by 15%. Certainly seems to be consistent in order of magnitude.

The Vodafone/Accenture report “Carbon Connections” follows a similar format to SMART 2020 looking at dematerialization, smart grid, logistics, smart cities and smart manufacturing, but as would be expected, pays closer attention to opportunities where remote and mobile applications can help. I am still processing the results and findings of the survey we did recently on awareness of Green IT amongst IT professionals. One of the preliminary findings though is that there is still a fairly significant lack of awareness amongst IT professionals of the extent of the role for IT and telecommunications services to reduce global emissions through substitution, business process change and promoting efficiency. So this report on the topic is valuable. “Carbon Connections” is worth a look if you are interested in the intersection between ICT and environmental sustainability.