The tech sector has proven its ability to ‘lead in innovations to improve sustainability‘, and now has the opportunity to accelerate its efforts, GlobalData has said.
Robert Pritchard, principal analyst, enterprise technology and services at GlobalData, was commenting as COP29 got underway in Baku, noting that while there was a “genuine sense of progress” at previous COP events, such as COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, “since then momentum has slowed, impact has dwindled, and attendance has fallen”.
Adding that “expectations for COP29 are low”, Pritchard noted the rise of “populist rhetoric and denial of the scientific proof, [which] is also becoming more mainstream, with many people considering climate change as someone else’s problem – until they themselves are hit by a hurricane, wildfire, or flash flood.”
New challenge for the tech sector
According to Pritchard, the tech industry has traditionally led the way in setting and achieving ambitious sustainability goals, but the rapid adoption of generative AI has introduced new sustainability challenges.
Generative AI processes, for instance, require significantly more energy—around ten times that of typical online searches—intensifying the sector’s resource consumption, particularly in energy and water.
This ‘market-driven spike in demand’ has had consequences in terms of consumption of natural resources such as energy and water, leading data centre operators and others involved in the IT sector to look for solutions like nuclear power to mitigate the climate impact of their operations.
Read more: Big tech enabling spread of climate disinformation, report finds
Innovation leader
“Despite such headwinds, the tech sector as a whole continues to lead in innovations to improve sustainability in their own operations, across the supply and value chains, and for their enterprise customers,” he added. “Their efforts should be commended and encouraged because, as leading activists say, there is no Planet B.”
Enterprise communications service providers should continue to lead the way in addressing sustainability challenges, he concluded. Read more here.
