In early 2006, a number of ICT companies including HP, Intel and Sun Microsystems set up the GeSI EU ICT Sustainability Forum, in order to look into how the ICT sector can contribute to sustainability. At a Conference jointly organised by the Commission and the Forum entitled "Applying ICT-based solutions to energy efficiency challenges", industry actors and academics discussed the role that ICT can play in cutting down on greenhouse-gas emissions.
Issues debated in the 31 January 2007 conference included:
- Best-practice examples of how ICT solutions can contribute to solving the challenges of energy-efficiency goals;
- intelligent energy;
- sustainability in a global context;
- public procurement and energy efficiency;
- the economic advantages of going green, and;
- consumer education.
ETNO - the European Telecommunication Network Operators' organisation - elaborated, in close co-operation with WWF, a roadmap called "Saving the planet @ the speed of light". Both partners stress the importance of their novel industry-NGO alliance. They say that they share a number of common goals, namely:
- Having ICT recognised as an important part of the solution for combating climate change in Europe;
- convincing key actors such as the Commission and the European Investment Bank, to adopt a climate-change strategy for ICT, and;
- initiating concrete 'ICT-climate change programmes' in Europe, instead of seminars and reports that fail to deliver concrete results.
WWF stresses that there is a business case for cutting in on carbon dioxide emissions, because it can also help save costs for travel and material. WWF Researcher Dennis Pamlin said: "I want businesses to save energy because it also saves them money, and not because they feel they need to do something for our planet. That will always remain no more than a secondary priority."
The key elements of the road map are:
Travel replacement, using for example audio- and video-conferencing applications. ETNO and WWF have calculated that replacing 20% of business travels in the EU would result in CO2 reductions of some 22.35 million tonnes per year.
Emissions savings in the same order of magnitude, the two organisations say, could be achieved if more workers were given an opportunity to work at home, connecting to their office networks via the internet instead of commuting to work. Sustainable community and city planning and an openness to this on the part of employers and workers would be preconditional.
Additional savings of around 4 million tonnes of CO2 per year could be achieved, according to ETNO and WWF, through de-materialisation. This means that applications and material currently in use would be replaced by virtual equivalents in an electronic format. Examples include so-called virtual answering machines (voicemail), online billing and e-government services, instead of printed documents.
Together, WWF and ETNO say, these measures could result in a reduction of CO2 emissions of around 50 million tonnes per year before 2010. Both agree, however, that "the really big gains" will come only after that date, when they think replacing carbon-intensive activities with ICT will have entered the mainstream.
