Information technology and environmental awareness can work together to produce innovations that improve our lives, finds Nader Habib at a recent summit meeting in Cairo The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) summit that was held on 1 November in Cairo and hosted by Minister of Communications and Information Technology Tareq Kamel and Minister of State for Environmental Affairs Maged George played a role in raising awareness of how information and communication technology (ICT) can be used to tackle climate change and other environmental problems throughout the developing world, including the African continent and Arab states. As part of the summit meeting, an ITU symposium on ICT, the Environment and Climate Change suggested ways in which the new technologies can be leveraged to help the environment, the impact of human activities on the environment, particularly in the form of climate change, being an issue of growing international concern. Improving environmental protection, tackling global warming, enhancing resource management, building capacity, achieving sustainable development, and raising awareness were among the global challenges raised at the meeting, which suggested that ICT has a key role to play in mitigating and adapting to climate change. ICT is now embedded in almost all sectors of the global society and economy, with the digital revolution and proliferation of ICT having changed people's lives dramatically and boosted economic growth. While the ICT industry is now responsible for around two to three per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, these being the emissions thought to be responsible for climate change, ICT solutions have the potential to enhance performance across the economy in order to reduce the remaining 97- 98 per cent of emissions. Governments and business associations across the world have introduced a range of programmes and initiatives on ICT and the environment in order to address environmental challenges, particularly global warming, energy production, energy use and resource depletion. But it would be premature to claim that all countries, especially in the developing world, have reached a clear understanding of these threats or of how ICT can help mitigate them. In the lead up to the Cairo summit conference, the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, in October 2010 adopted resolutions on the role of telecommunications ICT in helping to mitigate climate change and help protect the environment. The resolutions identified the need to assist developing countries in taking advantage of the potential of ICT to tackle climate change and the need to encourage the design, implementation and use of energy and resource efficient ICT equipment and solutions, in order to promote a clean and safe environment. The Cairo summit meeting built on these resolutions, with a wealth of ideas being presented during the two-day meeting on how ICT, some of them related to communications and others concerning hardware and software, could be mobilised to meet the challenges of environmental change. Carlo Aloni, head of Ericsson Egypt and one of the participants at the meeting, told Al-Ahram Weekly that Ericsson had made significant investments in reducing its carbon emissions, with an overall target of a 40 per cent reduction within the next five years. Ericsson was "supporting operators to design networks in a more efficient way, as there is a direct correlation between network traffic and power consumption," Aloni said. "The more traffic you can take care of from a single node, the more efficient the system is, and we are developing dynamic features in the software, such that it switches off the power supply when not in use, or when not at peak load, in order to save energy." "However, for me the major contribution of ICT to the challenge of climate change is not just in reducing their own power consumption," Aloni said. "Instead, it is about looking at how the use of ICT can make savings on the emissions coming from other industries. Today, we are at a 'conversion point' of innovation, meaning that we are on the way to connecting 50 billion devices to global networks by 2020. We need to make sure that everything that can benefit from being networked is networked, which means that we will see e-traffic devices communicating with each other in ways that limit the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases." As part of Ericsson's efforts to reduce the power consumption of ICT equipment, Aloni added that the company had developed a "tower tube" design that does away with the need for expensive cooling of electronic systems. The design does not consume electricity in achieving cooling, since it is designed in such a way that air naturally circulates and cools the equipment. Also Ray Pinto, Microsoft government affairs manager for Europe the Middle East and Africa, told the Weekly that Microsoft was also producing new designs with the environment in mind. It was reducing overall carbon emissions by reducing travel by its employees, and the company "is analysing its carbon emissions in various ways, in order to find IT solutions that can reduce travel and enhance computer communication, such as through video- conferencing and other means." Pinto added that the power consumption of present data centres was high, and the industry as a whole needed to look at how these centres are powered and cooled. "We as an industry cannot continue with data centres as they are today. We need to be more sustainable," Pinto said. "For example, we have built a third-generation data centre in Dublin, Ireland, which uses ambient cold air to cool the servers, meaning that the whole centre only uses some one per cent of the cooling water usually used for a facility of this size. Let me put this into perspective: a centre that size normally needs 18 million litres of water a month, but this new centre uses less than one per cent of that." "Another way we are reducing data-centre power consumption is by developing 'smart algorithms' that allow servers to process data such that they are not running hot all the time. Thanks to these new algorithms, we can shut down different areas of the servers and make sure that the data actually being used in a process is the data that receives the power necessary. We have also built data centres that are powered by alternative energy supplies, such as hydro-electric power, like we have at our Washington DC centre, or wind turbines, like we have in Dublin." "We have also found that we can put high-storage centres in very small facilities, and these facilities use the naturally cold air from the environment to extract and recycle heat generated by the servers. As a result of such technical innovations, the amount of cooling water required can be drastically reduced, such that all that is needed today is a regular domestic supply that can be turned on when necessary. Water can even be shipped out on a flat-bed truck and delivered to a data centre powered by solar panels or wind turbines, or other forms of sustainable power." The energy efficiency of an ICT data centre is measured in terms of its power use effectiveness (PUE), which measures in particular how much power is needed to cool the centre to optimal operating temperatures. Much of the power consumption of such centres comes from cooling costs, and the aim of current research, such as that carried out by Microsoft, is to find ways of reducing cooling costs to a minimum. "The Dublin data centre has significantly reduced power consumption, but we are trying to reduce it even further," Pinto said. "We are investing some $9.4 billion a year in innovation, not all of it in the field of climate change and energy efficiency, but a significant part of that investment is in ways of reducing energy consumption and in making systems as a whole more efficient. If you look at a product like Windows 7, for example, you will find that it now has a power option within the operating system that is automatically set to default mode in order to make it more energy efficient." "If you want to make it less efficient, you have to go into the code and try to change it. The software almost 'forces' people to be energy efficient. In November 2009, we also launched AirWatch, an online solution for sharing data on air quality that is delivered through the Eye On Earth Online Environmental Observatory. This shares information on the quality of European water, soil, air and ozone, making it all available in one place. Our first solution, delivered in July 2008, was WaterWatch, a water-quality monitoring tool that covers thousands of swimming spots at European beaches, lakes and rivers." Pinto added that "gas emissions are also a major public health issue. Until now, people in Europe did not have a simple way to check the quality of the air they breathe, or the ability to offer feedback on inconsistencies in reported information. Today, from 6,000 monitoring points across 32 countries in Europe, AirWatch receives data on air quality and then presents ratings across the region in 24 languages. It uses a traffic-light style of evaluation of air quality based on traditional monitoring methods, and this is supported by ratings reflecting the experiences of people who have visited the locations. Combining these streams of information provides accurate and up-to-date information on air quality across Europe, and makes it available to anyone who has access to the Internet." Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Environment Agency (EEA), believes that "as environmental problems become more evident and affect the lives of ordinary individuals, it is vitally important that we can access relevant and timely information on the impact of environmental change," adding that the Eye On Earth system, developed by Microsoft in association with the EEA, aimed "to bring complex strands of information together into a single, simple-to-use and easy-to-understand application. As more data and user findings are posted on the portal, we can see how climate change affects the way we live and how the way we live affects the environment." According to Geoffrey Lipman, a spokesperson for the UN World Tourism Organisation, "Eye On Earth delivers the kinds of information that the public can understand" on environmental awareness and climate change. "By using the application, people can now find out what is happening on the beach and the city near them, or the one they plan to visit on holiday. The technology demonstrates how ICT can develop our understanding of the world around us and let us make informed choices on the kind of environment we want to live in or visit." By applying technology like Microsoft's Silverlight and Bing mapping system, Eye On Earth provides a bird's eye view of areas users may live in or plan to visit, while the system's data management and geospatial capabilities analyse data and convert it into information that helps users understand the quality of the air they may be breathing. Utilising new "cloud computing" capabilities, the system aims to ensure that the information is quickly and easily available from any Internet-enabled device. Microsoft is also making Eye On Earth available to over 100 million users of its MSN online media network through channels in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Pinto confirms what McGlade says: "The launch of Eye On Earth with WaterWatch and now AirWatch takes our technology ambitions up a level. Given the increasing data volumes and user-access needs, we need new levels of scalability and availability, which we will get through cloud- computing solutions." Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, adds that "Eye On Earth is a great example of how technology has the power to help governments, businesses and individuals understand what is happening to our environment." "By combining environmental data with mapping technologies, it is possible for people to see where changes are happening. Eye On Earth provides people with information that has historically been difficult to find. With this new application, people will be more informed about the quality of their environment and able to make decisions based on facts not assumptions," he said. With an increasing number of governments in the Middle East and North Africa, including the Egyptian government, adopting ambitious plans to introduce smart or green ICT, it seems that products such as those showcased at the ITU summit meeting by Ericsson and Microsoft can help them to meet their ambitions, with green ICT becoming an integral part of sustainable growth.
