Industry Has Role in Tackling Climate Change, E-Waste, Says UNEP Head

The information and communications technology industry should work with the United Nations in addressing climate change and e-waste issues, the head of the United Nations Environment Programme said Tuesday. “We have increasingly watched with concern the global e-waste mount,” said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner on a virtual “smart ICT” summit. “We also know that increasingly electronic waste is being exported to developing countries and not being disposed of correctly.” The ICT industry should partner with the U.N. as well as industry bodies to manage the e-waste problem by adopting a “life-cycle approach to these products,” he said.

ICT can be “part of the problem or become part of the solution” in tackling climate change, Steiner said. The industry accounts for 2 percent of worldwide carbon emissions and its footprint is growing, he said. So the “energy efficiency of using ICT is a key factor in determining whether ICT becomes more of a liability in climate change or becomes part of the solution.” Recent developments in the industry show it’s moving in the “right direction,” he said. “We also know that ICT is a means to achieving energy efficiency across a whole range of sectors.” The U.N.’s estimates show that ICT can help reduce emissions by 15 percent in other industry sectors, he said.

The U.N. has been “recognizing for many years” ICT’s “critical role” in helping address global warming, as also the dangers of industry inaction, including “new problems and exacerbation of existing ones” in a world “ever more dependent” on ICT, Steiner said. The UNEP has been focused on the concept of a “green economy” and has been advising governments that have created stimulus packages in light of the global financial crisis to direct some of the money for technologies that lead to efficiency gains, he said.

"ICT is central to enabling us to develop smart grid systems,” Steiner said. The argument often made against renewable energy is that it’s unreliable as the “backbone of our electricity supply” system, he said. ICT can resolve that problem through its use in the smart grid that can route energy from a region where the “sun is shining [and] the wind is blowing to another part of the market where that may not be the case but the demand is there,” he said.

Major technology companies are working on a project called “desert tech” that will tap solar energy from the Sahara region in Africa to feed the grid in Europe, Steiner said. If the project succeeds, it will result in Europe becoming “less dependent” on fossil fuel and nuclear energy, he said. “In order to make such a complex system of [linking] power generation in one region and power distribution in another region, you need to have state-of-the-art ICT.”