Tom Raftery – Global VP, Futurist, and Innovation Evangelist for SAP, inspirational keynote speaker, and global influencer's take on how digitization and innovation are creatively disrupting our world
When I published my review of tech company sustainability reports a couple of weeks back, it was suggested that I should add in telco’s as well. Instead, for clarity, I decided to publish a separate review of telco sustainability reports here.
In an otherwise good report, it was disappointing to see the Chairman’s involvement was a cut & paste of an online discussion he had about sustainability on another site as opposed to something specific to the report. Also, the fact that it contained a photo of the Chair using bottled waste doesn’t speak well for his commitment to sustainability
China Mobile is the 1st mainland Chinese co. listed on the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes and the thoroughness of this report is a testament to that (in English)
Download procedure for PDF is not straightforward and commitment to produce 2009 report by May 2010 has not been met. Also the report is short on numbers and more especially targets.
I realised recently that although I have referred to the talk I gave in Barcelona on Mobile Sustainability (for the Mobile 2.0 conference) in a couple of posts I never talked about the talk directly here, so now it is time to redress that.
I have posted the slide deck above so you can follow along with the slides above and my explanation below.
Slides 1-3 are simply my introducing the topic and myself (along with my contact details).
I started off with a bit of a background:
Slides 4-6 I start to talk about some of the reasons why sustainability is important. Climate change, for example, is real and is recognised as real. Even that last hold-out, the US government, has now admitted it is real and have set up the United States Global Change Research program to study the effects of Climate Change on the US.
Slide 7 – New studies show that the impacts of climate change are likely to be worse than we anticipated
Slide 8 – The polar ice caps are shrinking far faster than anyone predicted
Slide 9 – Climate change is affecting animal populations today
Slide 10 – Climate change is affecting the world’s river systems, and thus access to water for many people globally today
Slide 11-13 – This is having devastating effects on people in South America, the Middle East, and Asia (and agriculture in Australia and California)
Slide 14 – NGO’s are warning that the humanitarian systems, already stretched thin, will be overwhelmed
Then I went on to discuss the business case for sustainability today:
Slide 18 – Then there’s the Goldman Sachs GS Sustain focus list
Slide 19 – Not to mention the AT Kearney “Green Winners” [PDF warning] research which showed that “during the current economic slowdown, companies that show a “true” commitment to sustainability appear to outperform their industry peers”
Slides 20-22 – Examples of large companies (GE, DuPont, 3M) who cut costs, reduced carbon emissions and increased revenue by focussing on sustainability
Having set the stage (we need to be more sustainable, and look, there is a strong consensus that there is a business case for it too), I started to bring the talk around to the subject of the Mobile industry:
Slide 24 – Quote from Smart 2020 report saying ICTs could deliver emissions reductions of at least 15% by 2020
Slide 25 – While there are 1 billion PCs in the world today, and 1.4 billion Internet users, there are 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions
Slides 26-29 – Examples of Green handsets from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. I made the point here that in many cases the ‘Green handsets’ being produced by manufacturers are simply so they can ‘tick that box’ in the annual report. Sony had 57 handsets on their website. 1 was green. Green handsets should be the rule, not the exception.
Slides 30-33 – I checked out the websites some of the main mobile operators. 3 have no mention whatsoever (that I could find) of sustainability on their corporate website; the websites of Telefonica and O2 had Sustainability sites but they could both stand a lot of work, while Vodafone’s Sustainability site was the best of the mobile operators which I examined (that’s not to say it couldn’t stand some improvement too!)
Slides 34-36 A quick look at some of the Sustainability apps which have been developed for the mobile platform – slim pickings, tbh!
So having shown how poorly this industry is doing in terms of sustainability, I posited a few what-if’s:
Slide 38
What if manufacturers made phones which lasted 6 yrs not 6 months? Rent, not buy?
What if manufacturers made non-toxic handsets?
What if manufacturers standardised to usb chargers?
What if mobile operators switched to e-billing?
Slide 39
What if carriers avoided unnecessary duplication in mobile networks, (would lead to a savings of 300gWh pa in UK alone)
What if everyone pushed sustainability down supply chain?
What if developers used mobile platform to build apps which ‘made a difference’?
What if grid computing client apps were created for mobiles?
Other?
Finally, I concluded with two quotes to show why this is critical:
Slide 40 – From the 2007 IPCC Climate Change Synthesis Report [PDF Warning]
As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5 degrees C, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.
Slide 41 – From the Chair of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri
If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.
Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC’s quotes are the conservative point of view.
Mobile phones are ubiquitous. There are in excess of 4 billion of them. They are now for all intents and purposes hand-held computers increasingly with an Internet connection. Shame on us all if we don’t leverage this incredible resource in the battle to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Dennis was so infuriated with the router his ISP (Telefonica) gave him and the cruddy service he constantly received from them that he smashed up his router with a hammer and put the video up on YouTube!
A must see!
By the way Dennis, you might want to check out this post about the ToS of video sharing sites!
Tom Raftery – Global VP, Futurist, and Innovation Evangelist for SAP, inspirational keynote speaker, and global influencer's take on how digitization and innovation are creatively disrupting our world