ABSTRACT
Telecommunications is, in general terms, an environmentally friendly industry; however, carriers and service providers do use relatively large quantities of energy and exert a nontrivial impact on the environment; therefore, the time has come to introduce Green technologies and processing into the networking field itself. According to some sources,† the total contribution of ICT to global green house gases (GHG) emissions, including carbon dioxide (CO2), is in the range of 2% to 2.5% of total emissions, with about 0.2% attributed to mobile telecom and about 0.3% to fixed telecom (the balance being with PCs, data centers, etc.). (See Figure 1.1, which provides two reasonably consistent views from two industry sources.) These percentages as well as the absolute values may grow as ICTs become even more widely deployed; in a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, the ICT sector’s own emissions are expected to increase from 0.53 billion tons (Gt) carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) in 2002 to 1.43 GtCO2e in 2020. At the same time it should be noted that ICT contributes as much as 7% of global gross domestic product (GDP). Propitiously, there is a parallel recognition that ICT can enable significant reductions in emissions in other sectors of the economy, such as “smart” logistics, “smart” buildings,‡ “smart” motor systems, and “smart” grids, to list just a few. By enabling other sectors to reduce their emissions, the ICT industry is positioned to be able to facilitate the reduction of global emissions by as much as 15% by 2020 [GES200801] (specific ICT opportunities-such as the replacement of goods and services with virtual equivalents [this being known as de-materialization] and the introduction of telecommand/telecommunication technology to enable energy efficiency-can lead to emission reductions five times the size of the sector’s own footprint, namely, up to 7.8 GtCO2e).
