COP29 and Digital Technology: Solution or Risk?

You may wonder what COP is. Conference of the Parties (COP) is the group of Convention decision-makers who represent every UN member state’s ‘Parties to the Convention’. They attend the COP yearly to review the execution of the ‘Convention and legal instruments’ that the COP embraces and make appropriate decisions to drive the successful execution of the Convention. With COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, just coming to a close, this article aims to reflect on ‘Digitalisation Day’, which was first launched on November 16, 2024, with over 90 governments and more than 1,000 members of the digital technology communities. These consist of global organisations, financial institutions, charities, academia, and civil society organisations, that endorse the ‘COP29 Declaration on the Green Digital Action’. 

What is the Declaration all about? Briefly speaking, these organisations know there is potential in using digital technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), to achieve the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s objective, which is to balance the greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere. For example, organisations may use IoT to optimise energy consumption in buildings and AI to monitor and control energy usage in industrial processes. The organisations who signed the declaration believe that digital technologies may reduce GHG emissions in our economic systems with effective utilisation and governance to optimise energy consumption. At the same time, they are aware that our current technologies may pose potential risks in overconsumption of energy and water when producing and running infrastructures that support these digital technologies, not to forget the capacity for disinformation, misinformation, exclusion, and misuse of these digital technologies, and also, the amount of e-waste produced.  

When we dive deeper into the World Bank and the United Nations International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) (ICT) emissions report, we find that the sources of ICT emissions may come from the production and utilisation of consumer devices. These include computers, smartphones, tablets, data centres, and connectivity networks, including mobile and fixed networks. They have determined that we must reduce GHG emissions by at least 45% in the next five years to ensure we follow the 1.5°C trajectory. While researchers, including Freitag, suggest that the global emissions from ICT can be up to 3.9%, the report estimates that over 1.7% of global emissions are from ICT. Still, this figure is only an estimate and may be highly inaccurate, because the sector lacks standardisation of emission reporting. 

As you read this article or consume any media, you are one of the 5.4 billion people, about 67% of today’s world population, who also consume GHG. Imagine in an organisational context, we can easily triple our GHG consumption when we conduct virtual meetings using varied telecommunications applications with our cameras on. We must consider our digital consumption and its environmental impact. Have we ever thought about how much GHG we have used to write this article? How much GHG would it take to search for and promote this article? How much GHG would it take to store this article? To answer these questions, we might find the IPA Media Carbon Calculator useful to track our current state, and then improve it! It’s easy to focus on the transport systems we use and overlook our everyday consumption through our digital communications. During COP29, the ITU set goals to ensure that digital infrastructure remains resilient, promoting and using green and sustainable technologies, and, most importantly, tackling the data challenges we briefly explored. 

But how do organisations move this forward strategically and operationally? Having worked with ICT professionals, the ICT sector may be rather good at tracking IT spending, benchmarking IT maturity using varied tools, and adopting various international standards such as the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 27001, which manages the risks of cyber attack. Perhaps the next step might be to encourage organisations to adopt varied ISOs. There are currently a few revised ISOs that may help tackle the tracking, reporting and monitoring of GHG challenges in the ICT sector through legislation as an instrument. For example, ISO 14064-1: 2018 may guide the Reporting of GHG), ISO 14067: 2018 may help the sector track the carbon footprint of products, ISO 14068-1:2023 may help overall organisations transition to Net Zero, ISO 14083: 2023 may guide ways to report GHG, and ISO 14000 family that focuses on environmental management, usually being implemented by the sustainability team in-house may help the overarching management of GHG. In an ideal world, we need varied teams within organisations to collaborate to effectively implement all these standards closely. But ISOs could be rather challenging to implement because they require mass cooperation between varied departments. Some can resist changing their way of working, and there might also be a lack of budget and resources specialised in ISO implementation. However, this suggested step might be the way forward; in COP30, the extent to which this approach may be practical could, and should, be evaluated by the representatives.