Environmental opportunity
Business as usual is no longer viable. The world’s ability to absorb CO2e is limited and natural resources are increasingly constrained. Historically, the link between economic growth, CO2e emissions and resource use has been very strong, with 1% growth in world GDP resulting in 0.5% increase in CO2e emissions and 0.4% in resource consumption. This model has reached its limits, as climate change and resource scarcity are becoming more pressing issues. In order to sustain further economic growth in the coming decades, the world must shift to a low carbon growth path by “decoupling” economic growth from CO2e emissions and resource consumption.
By the year 2030, ICT has the potential to hold global CO2e emissions at 2015 levels and to reduce our consumption of scarce resources. The acceleration of digital technologies is increasing the scale and pace of the sustainability benefits especially through greater user centricity, increased digital density and innovative new business models.
ICT offers additional environmental benefits beyond carbon mitigation, such as delivering better agricultural yields and helping to reduce the consumption of scarce resources like fuel, and water and other resources such as paper. Smarter solutions across sectors on a global scale can help produce more while wasting less and hold the potential of effectively decoupling economic growth from CO2e emissions and resource usage.
"Decreasing global carbon emissions and saving scarce resource."
Case example
Connected Car – Solutions for Sustainability
Improving the efficiency of traffic, mobility and private transportation is one of the main ways in which major issues such as CO2e emissions and air pollution can be reduced. Deutsche Telekom developed a Connected Car Solutions Suite for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) that can enable people to drive their cars more efficiently and sustainably. Your ‘Connected Car’ can combine a range of smart driving solutions such as: Eco-drive, a coaching system for optimizing driver behavior; Car2x, a real-time guiding system to anticipate the traffic environment; E-Call, an automatic emergency contact system; and Live Traffic, a real-time information system on traffic jams and alternative routes.
These Connected Car solutions provide significant sustainability benefits, not only environmental, but also social and economic. For drivers it can reduce annual CO2e emissions by 15.9% per car, save €237 per year from reduced fuel consumption and 23 hours per year through reduced time in traffic. For the automotive industry, Connected Car solutions helps OEMs contribute to CO2e emissions reduction targets and helps improve reputation as well as market position and sales. For Germany, it was calculated that 16% of all domestic traffic-related CO2e emissions could be avoided, equal to 2% of all domestic CO2e emissions. Furthermore, reduced congestion and traffic jams through ICT-enabled safer and smarter driving would reduce asthma-related sickness days and as well as road accidents.
Link to webpage:http://www.cr-report.telekom.com/site15/customers/sustainable-products/innovation-growth-areas#atn-6057-6062
Environmental
benefits quantified
ICT-enabled solutions contribute to reducing the global environmental footprint, through CO2e abatement and resource savings across different sectors globally.
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CO2e abatement globally
In a “business as usual” scenario global emissions are expected to increase to 63.5 Gt CO2e by 2030 from current emission levels of 52.4 Gt CO2e in 2015. However, ICT has the potential to hold global CO2e emissions at 2015 levels, even taking into account the sector’s own direct emissions. In fact, by 2030 ICT could generate CO2e abatement of 12.08 Gt CO2e, which is 9.7 times higher the sector’s own direct emissions. Global adoption of ICT could help achieve the goal of breaking the historical connection between economic growth and CO2e emissions, where each 1% of growth in GDP equated to a 0.5% increase in CO2e emissions.
112.08 Gt CO2e if we include the abatement potential thanks to the inclusion of renewable energies in the grid. This has been deducted to avoid double counting with baseline projections, as the inclusion of renewables may have been included already.
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CO2e abatement per sector
ICT-enabled solutions are expected to have the greatest impact across 8 sectors, where smart manufacturing, agriculture, buildings and mobility contribute more than 70% of the total abatement potential.
Connected private transportation, optimized traffic flows and smart logistics could help abate 3.8 Gt CO2e, including abatement from avoided travel from other activities, such as e-work, e-health and e-learning. Smart manufacturing, including virtual manufacturing, customer centric production, energy management and smart services could help abate 2.5 Gt CO2e. Productivity and efficiency improvements in the agriculture sector could help abate 2 Gt CO2e, while automated control, smart metering and data analytics in the smart building sector can potentially generate an abatement potential of 2.0 Gt CO2e.
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Resource Savings
ICT helps bring efficiency benefits to many of our daily activities such as working, traveling and shopping, as well as in business processes such as manufacturing and food production. By driving efficiency improvements and smarter use of resources ICT has the potential to greatly reduce resource consumption while enhancing productivity and economic outputs.
Globally and across sectors, ICT could save up to 1 trillion liters of fuel, 25 billion barrels of oil, 300 trillion liters of water and 91 million tons of paper compared to a business as usual scenario. In addition, ICT can help produce more while wasting less. For example, smart agriculture could boost yields by 30%, avoid 20% of food waste, and reduce water use by 251 trillion liters, a number equivalent to 25 times the daily world water consumption.
+900 kg crop yeld
increase per hectare from Smart Agriculture-135 milion cars
reduced from total installed base-332 trillion liters of water
saved across all sectors analyzedSource: WRI, IPCC, GeSI, SMARTer2030, Accenture analysis & CO2e models