Challenges and Opportunities: Emerging Technologies and Sustainability Impacts 

Experts Discuss Technology’s Environmental Impact and EU’s Green Digital Transformation at IEEE Workshop

In a workshop moderated by Karen Mulberry from the IEEE Standards Association, experts convened to discuss the intersection of emerging technologies, sustainability, and the environmental impact of technological advancements. The workshop aimed to explore the challenges and opportunities associated with these technologies, particularly in light of the European Union’s (EU) strategic direction towards a green digital transformation.

Martina Barbero of the European Commission outlined the EU’s approach to sustainability in the digital sector. She emphasized the need for a human-centric Internet that prioritizes sustainability. Barbero highlighted the growing ICT footprint, with emissions and e-waste presenting significant challenges. However, she also noted the potential for digital transformation to reduce emissions, as evidenced by the efficiency improvements from 5G compared to 4G.

Barbero discussed the EU’s initiatives to address sustainability in technology, including the eco-design for sustainable products regulation targeting consumer devices. She mentioned the Code of Conducts for data centres and broadband equipment, the European Processor Initiative, and the EU taxonomy for sustainable economic activities. Additionally, Barbero introduced the European Green Digital Coalition, which aims for net neutrality by 2040 and has developed a methodology for assessing the net carbon impact of ICT solutions.

The workshop also focused on the “middle layer” of the Internet, including domain name systems, websites, internet standards, and protocols. Barbero emphasized the importance of this layer in sustainability efforts, referencing the Declaration on the Future of the Internet, which mandates sustainability as a key principle.

Sigmund Kluckne, a freelance consultant, discussed the role of standardization in promoting sustainability in technology. He highlighted the importance of reducing waste, sharing practices, and using technology for sustainability. Kluckne cited examples such as AI for climate change, digital twins of the Earth, and the digital product passport. He introduced the IEEE’s Planet Positive 2030 project, which seeks technical solutions for a sustainable planet, and called for sustainability by design in products and services.

Mario Birkholz presented a case study on sustainable smartphone use, comparing smartphone energy consumption in Europe to the continent’s solar power generation. He recommended steps for individuals to make their smartphone use more sustainable, such as disabling unnecessary features and using alternative operating systems. Birkholz also called for political measures to support European products, extend smartphone lifetimes, and promote free and open-source software.

The discussion addressed the digital product passport and the right to repair. France’s repairability index was mentioned as an example of informing consumers about product repairability. Questions from the audience raised concerns about the use of renewable energy for server parks and the role of standardization in the sustainability of technologies like 6G. The need for cohesive policy implementation to achieve EU climate neutrality by 2050 was underscored, with a call for community involvement in identifying implementation gaps and issues.

In summary, the workshop highlighted the need for a comprehensive approach to sustainability in technology, covering infrastructure, applications, and the middle layer of the Internet. It emphasized consumer awareness, policy support, and community action as vital components in driving sustainability in the technology sector.

Karen Mulberry:
All right, I’d like to welcome everyone to workshop four, challenges and opportunities, emerging technologies, and sustainability impacts. As you can note, all of our speakers are remote because they do believe in being sustainable. I’m here in person to assist in the discussion and as the moderator. I’m Karen Mulberry with the IEEE Standards Association. So let me kind of provide some context for you. I mean, what we’re gonna do in this session is look at emerging technology. What’s the environmental impact of emerging technology? And then what the EU itself has directed, the direction to go into with their green digital transformation. I mean, they have a lot of different legislated initiatives out there that as emerging technology and other technologies are in use, you know, how do you consider the sustainability related to that? And, you know, what are the new opportunities that could be created as you move into a more circular economy and really look at sustainability as a critical component of this. But you also need to look at it as well with the context of privacy, security, and safety. I mean, those are critical components that are fundamental to rolling out emerging technology as well as creating that sustainable environment. Now, technology innovation has been around for many years and will continue to be. It’s moving faster than it used to and exponentially faster. You know, everyone’s heard of Moore’s Law that, you know, defines how technology progresses. Well, it used to be every six months you had a new version of something. Now I think it’s ours and there’s a new version of something that moves the technology needle further and further in different directions, much like we can see with AI. It’s driven a lot of new opportunities, innovations, risks, and challenges. So our workshop agenda is posted. So I’m going to start with Martina, who is going to kind of give you an introduction to what the EU Commission’s thinking is and the direction that they would like everyone to move towards. And then we’ll move on to several other speakers that will provide a different context, a different stakeholder group. So Martina, I will turn it over to you first, and then we’ll move on.

Martina Barbero:
Thank you very much. Thank you very much for inviting us to this very, very important workshop. I’m gonna be as brief as possible, also conscious of time and to give as much time as possible for the discussion. So what we would like to do today is to briefly set the scene in terms of the thinking of the Commission from a digital and sustainability angle, then discuss a bit what the Commission’s initiatives in this matter are, and then ask for your help to continue our thinking towards the next possible steps with a spotlight on the web itself. Before I start, just very briefly about me, I’m Martina Barbero, I’m a policy officer in Directorate E of the European Commission, which is the directorate in charge of future networks or the Internet of Tomorrow. And when we think about the Internet of Tomorrow, for us, we think about the human-centric Internet, which of course encompasses the dimension of sustainability, which is core to being human-centric. So if we go to exactly slide 6, so very briefly setting the scene, what we can do, well let’s move to slide 7 for the sake of time, is just to acknowledge, this is just a preamble of my presentation, to acknowledge that in the previous commission, which is still working but which will be replaced by a new commission soon, the green and digital transitions were extremely important, one of the two key objectives, but the articulation of how these two objectives should work together was not always straightforward. On one hand we are all well aware the ICT footprint is increasing, emissions and e-waste are definitely a problem and this trend is not going down, we have seen on the opposite that with artificial intelligence it’s actually going up. There’s also a question of market dynamics and problems linked to specific products, I’m thinking about obsolescence, blockchain mining, single use electronics, those are all sustainability issues from a market perspective. At the same time we’re also very much aware of the potential of the digital transformation for reducing emissions and we’ve seen for instance with 5G being much more, consuming much less CO2 than 4G for the same data package and the same set of applications. So this is all to say that we need, as European Commission, we need to be able to win on both fronts, on the digital and the green transformation, if we want our citizens to maintain their level of welfare, if not increase it. So what have we been doing, and we go to slide 9 directly, is we’re working on different aspects. This is just again for setting the scene and acknowledging that most of the emissions and the issues must come from consumer devices themselves. Of course there’s also work that can be done on data centres and connectivity networks and I will focus on that work. because the consumer device aspect is dealt with by other parts of the Commission. But on the consumer device, before we go into more the networks part, I just wanted to acknowledge that there’s the new eco-design for sustainable products regulation, which entered into force. This is a very important regulation, which will apply to tablets and smartphones, amongst others. And we hope that these rules will help significantly reduce the consumer devices, carbon footprint. So this is a really new regulation and the impacts will be difficult to assess for a while, but we have high hopes that this will help. But now for the rest of my presentation, I will focus more on the networks and the infrastructure aspect. So going to slide 10, the work the Commission has been conducting on reducing the impact of ICT sector from a network perspective started more than a decade ago, with the Code of Conducts for data center and broadband equipment. Those were really important pieces to start thinking about how the infrastructure could be more sustainable. And then the European Processor Initiative followed, with a roadmap to develop a less energy consuming processor built in Europe. We’re at the second stage of the roadmap. There’s also been in 2021, the EU taxonomy for the Climate Delegated Act. So this is about ensuring that from a financial perspective, the finance sector is able to recognize what are sustainable economic activities and what are not. And therefore, the financial sector can sustain the sustainable activities instead of investing in carbon heavy industries. And then what I would like to spend a couple of seconds on is the action plan on digitalizing the energy system, because this is something that we are really working on at the moment. And there are two actions in particular that are relevant for my directorate, which are the development of common indicators for measuring the environmental footprint of electronic communication services, which is a work in progress. And equally, if not more importantly, the Code of Conduct for the sustainability of the telecommunication networks. Going back to 2013, we had the Code of Conducts on data centres and broadband, so this Code of Conduct on telecommunication networks will come to complete the picture, and we hope it will contribute to progressing further on this path. And then, another couple of seconds on slide 15, on another initiative, which is dear to us, if we go to the next slide. Thank you. Which is the European Green Digital Coalition. This was launched a couple of years ago, and it’s an initiative that was launched by our commissioner, Breton, and it’s an initiative that gathers CEOs of ICT companies that have committed to net neutrality by 2040. And the idea is really for the industry to contribute to achieving these goals by sharing experience, measuring better the impact of ICT solutions, and generally building awareness. What I would like to highlight is that this initiative has recently published a net carbon impact assessment methodology for ICT solutions. So this is a peer-reviewed, very solid methodology that helps to assess for each ICT solution what would be the net carbon impact. And the idea is that there will be a follow-up project from this coalition that will help to socialize this tool, because we would like to test it across different industries, and also make sure that it starts a conversation about measurement, so that we can all start from the same assumption when we look at the impact of ICT solutions. So this is really important work for us. Now, if we move to the next part of the presentation, which is my last, what I would like to do with you today is to start a new conversation, which is really focusing on the web. If we go to slide 13, what you see here is a recap of what I’ve presented earlier. So we, as the European Commission, have been working a lot on the infrastructure layer, on connectivity networks, broadband. There’s a lot of work on data centers, internet exchange points, telcos. Those are all infrastructure aspects that have been in the radar and in the spotlight when it comes to reducing consumptions and emission. And we also worked a lot as European Commission on applications and products through, for instance, the eco-design relation that I mentioned earlier, but also sectoral regulation. What maybe is missing and what we would like to start discussing with you is what is in the middle, the middle layer. I call it the internet or the web because what we really mean by the middle layer is domain name systems, the website, internet standards and protocols. So everything that stands in between the pure infrastructure and the applications of product. Go to the next slide. We see that this conversation that we want to start today is triggered by a policy mandate, which is quite strong, which is the Declaration on the Future of the Internet. The Commission was one of the initiators of this declaration and this declaration has been signed by over 70 countries from all across the globe. And this declaration insists on a number of principles that needs to underpin the future internet and sustainability is clearly one of them. Internet must also be used to help fight against climate change. And not only the declaration highlights this principle, but it gives also a mandate to work with others, other countries to make sure that we reduce as much as possible the carbon footprint and environmental footprint of the internet. And we help and we use this to combat climate change. So we do have a policy mandate to start this conversation and we want to, you know, use this principle as a guide for thinking ahead about what can come next. And this leads me to my last slide, which is about what we are thinking in terms of like greening the web and what we can do more that has not been done yet. First of all, let me put a caveat that this is extremely early thinking and it’s really just these ideas that we have on the slide are really to trigger a conversation because we value the input of this community and we want to get feedback. view, nothing set in stone and there is nothing planned in any way from any legislative perspective whatsoever. This is just really for brainstorming purposes. But when we look at this missing link between the infrastructure and the product and application layer, we have seen a couple of angles that could be explored further. One which is linked to greener websites. So here what we are thinking about is increasing the adoption of industry code of conducts and raising industry standards in terms of, for instance, low energy website and web design, sustainable DNS hosting, and also increasing consumer awareness and choices so they can decide, for instance, to go black and white on their smartphone. But here building on what already exists. And we know there’s a lot of very good efforts from very good sides. For instance, the Sustainable Web Manifesto and the Web Sustainability Guidelines from W3C. So we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. But as policymakers, we wonder what we can do to support these efforts and make sure that the next generation of internet websites are much more sustainable. And we’re not going through, we’re not going down a rabbit hole of heavier and heavier website with heavier and heavier media contents, etc. Another aspect where we could look at is the question of internet protocols and standards. So when we think about that, we think about, for instance, the work that EITF, so the Internet Engineering Task Force, has been doing for ensuring that their standards are fit for purpose in context of low connectivity. So they’ve been embedding new requirements in the standard making to ensure that, you know, whichever standard is produced, whichever new standard is produced can work also in contexts that are low connectivity context, which means that the standards produced are much more inclusive for global south countries, for instance. We would like to have a similar reflection and steer a similar conversation when it comes to sustainability and greening the web, meaning that sustainability must become part of a requirement and a criteria for standards making and standard making organization needs. are aware of this aspect when taking their decision. And then finally, and again, this is really early thinking also with a caveat that we know that all these efforts are really focusing on a limited number of emissions compared to purely infrastructural aspects. But still, we are here today online, we’re having this hybrid meeting, and it’s true that the internet governance practices and the face-to-face meeting have a huge value and we appreciate that, but we also need to think about ways for the community to meet and discuss by exploiting other avenues that is not traveling across the globe, just to be coherent with the efforts of reducing emissions that have been done on all the other fronts. So just to conclude, this is really, in terms of the amount of CO2 emission that we can reduce by doing these efforts, this is maybe very limited, but because we have been working so much on the application of product layers and because we have been working so much on the infrastructure layer, we want to have a coherent package. And what I’m looking forward to today is to have a conversation with you about these and other ideas, and feel free to shut us down, to tell us we are wrong and we should look at other things, because that’s what we’re looking for in the conversation with you. Thank you very much.

Karen Mulberry:
Thank you. Now, let’s move on to our next speaker. Yes. Ziggy, please.

Sigmund Kluckne:
I’m right here. You can hear me, right?

Karen Mulberry:
Yes, we can. Thank you.

Sigmund Kluckne:
All right. All right. So I’m normally not self-absorbed, but I figured I’ll give you a picture of myself so that you can see me in full screen for a little bit. I’m Ziggy. I work as a freelance consultant on digital innovation for and in sustainability. And you’ll see what I mean with this in a minute. I will give a little bit of an overview from the community perspective. So what has happened? What is currently going on? And where can we as a community, and especially there… I’m also the chair of the IEEE Standard Working Group on the Technology Knowledge Commons. How can we as a community drive sustainability, help with sustainability, and use sustainability for the better of the planet? So I don’t need to say this anymore, because Martina already said a lot of this. What I had to say anyway, but why is sustainability and technology even a thing? So yeah, you mentioned 2-3% of the greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the internet. That means also that the airline industry is about that at that same level, right? So we need to make sure that we as technologists have a little bit of an impact. And what can we do? The first slide here is that we can make technology more sustainable. Martina, you mentioned this already as well. There are so many, so many ways that we can make sure that technology is getting more sustainable. We started with the circular economy a few years or decades back, or the early ideas of the circular economy. So much more can be done. You know the many R’s from refusing to recycling. We have the right repair movement that’s growing and growing. And I have to say, it’s also fun to repair technology. I think I replaced about 7 iPhone batteries in my lifetime by now. It’s finicky, but it’s fun to actually figure it out and then get it to run again. Of course, we need to reduce the duplication of work. We have standardization as one piece of the puzzle, and I’ll come back to that in a little bit. But we also have not sharing practices. So not sharing of practices. I mentioned here OEPS as a completely different monster or from a different sector, the ocean best practices. So the ocean scientific community has a system, an online platform where they share their practices and they share what they have done. And others can replicate that without having to think about this from scratch. And then, of course, we have the sustainability of the web, Martina, you already mentioned that. You mentioned the World Wide Web Consortium, the sustainability web working group that gives out guidelines on how to make the web more sustainable and less emitting. There are a few companies coming up that also provide audits of your website. I have chosen one example here of CleanerWeb on the Eurodig website, that for one visit you emit or the whole process emits 0.34 grams of CO2, which is fairly OK, I have to say. So good job. It got a score of C, so there are improvements. The websites also normally give improvements and potentials on what could be done better and shows you a little bit like the left circle up there is the amount of green energy that’s used by hosting this. The middle circle is the different types of media that is used. So the biggest chunk are the images, and that is obviously because they are big in size, they will use more CO2 or more energy to emit, to transfer, and that’s also more CO2. And of course, we also have just simple good practices. If you are streaming a video or a TV show, turn off autoplay when you fall asleep so that it doesn’t keep going, and that is already a good win for the environment. And the other thing that we can do is to use technology for sustainability, and that’s on my next slide, Karin, or Constance. So we can use technology for sustainability. I think you all are aware of the Climate Change AI group, using AI for climate change. They are working together on models, projections, everything that can be around the earth and climate change. We also have… for example, digital twins of the Earth that are upcoming, which basically take the replication of Earth into the virtual world, making sure that if there is anything, we can use simulations, we can use protections, we can ask what if questions, but we can also use the outcomes to then act on these different recommendations on policy level, on operations level, if it’s a harbor, anything in that area. Of course, we have industry 4.0 with the Internet of Things. The more data we have, the more data we can use to analyze and we can improve manufacturing. About 15 years ago, I was working at a manufacturing line and I collected data to reduce waste. And one of the things that is really interesting here is that it’s not only about the sustainability, it’s also a financial improvement, right? Reducing waste means or like production waste means that you have less material to use, so you pay less for your core product. Of course, then we have the digital product passport, if that’s a name that rings a bell. Basically, a digital overview, a fact sheet of every product that includes, you know, what is the supply chain like, what materials were used, and which impacts those materials and the product processing had on this very product until it’s in your hands. And then we are using a lot, or at least a lot of people I know, especially from the field, are using online refurbished used or used marketplaces, right? You’re trying to reduce the new products. If you have a phone that is broken, either you fix it with the fixing guides or you buy a refurbished one because you might not need the newest, most polished item. Okay, so why am I saying all of this? So the next slide, this is probably my main point, we need to be fast. We need to make sure that we do the best that we can. And the question is, where do we go from here? And what can we do? So we have one aspect is sustainability by design, right? Very, very straightforward in the thinking way, not read, not very straightforward in the actual implementation way. We just need to make sure that all our products and everything that we do is actually contributing to sustainability and to a sustainable and healthy planet. The question is, especially for this forum here, can internet policy and tech governance as a whole be a lever to do that? We already saw the website emissions, we saw the renewable energy and data centers. We know that there are a lot of data centers trying to go green, trying to go we use renewable energy. The question is, for me, and this is to the audience as well, can internet policy and tech governments be a level for this? And of course, lastly, we need to work together. And I brought two examples here from the IEEE world. One is the Planet Positive collaborative, I want to say the project on my next slide. So Planet Positive 2030. What does that mean? Obviously, the planet is our focus. Positive is our purpose. That means we are giving more back than we take from the planet, or that is removed from the planet. So we are not trying, we’re trying to harm, stop harming the planet, yet being positive, right? Making sure that we have that in mind. And 2030 is because it’s urgent. As I said, we need to be fast. We’re running out of time. And we need to make sure that everything we do and develop is helpful. but also that we can actually develop technology that can help with this vision. And in a Planet Positive group, we had 400 experts that collaborated on a vision for our planet. On the right-hand side, you see the first draft of the Strong Sustainability by Design document. The QR code links you to that. You can go there. And then the Planet Positive 2030, the whole basis of this was to transform, to have those two impossible goals, to transform society and infrastructure to a Planet Positivity, and to identify solutions we need for Planet Positive by 2030. So literally identifying those technical solutions that we can use as a society. And lastly, I have the Sustainability-Related Standards Projects. So I mentioned I am the chair of what is called the P7801, the Technical Knowledge, Comments, Initiatives, and Platforms. So we’re developing a recommended practice on that one. But then also, within the IEEE only, we have at least those four, where we are addressing sustainability, environmental stewardship, and climate challenges in professional practice. So we’re trying to think about how can universities and apprenticeship and schools in general include sustainability in their curriculum. We have the measurement verification of the reduction of greenhouse gases, especially for the occasion of those projects that are doing that. Or, for example, last example, we have inclusive and sustainable smart cities, which all will look at either a recommended practice as a guidelines or a standard on how to assess, how to develop one of these special topics. And lastly, this is my call to action. To everybody, please join us. On that slide, you’ll have my name and my… Email address if you’re interested in joining any of those working groups or plan a positive or want to share, share or exchange thoughts, please do reach out. Thank you.

Karen Mulberry:
Thank you. Next we actually have a use. I know there’s a question in the chat, and I will bring that up when we get to the panel discussion so all of our speakers would have an opportunity to weigh in on that, that question. So our next speaker actually is going to be on a on a case study of sustainable use of a smartphone. So that that gives you at least one example that’s, you know, been raised in terms of it’s a device that is from a consumer perspective takes up a lot of resources. So let me turn it over to to Dr. Mario Birkholz. Please, over to you.

Mario Birkholz:
Thank you, Karen, for introducing. Yeah, let’s have a look on the first slide. I’d like to report today about a study I made with colleagues on one of the central gadgets we are using in the ICT sector. We all dispose of a smartphone. I guess there’s no one in the in the auditorium who does not dispose of one. So that was an interesting example to to look for how sustainable its use would be. On the next slide, you see a QR code where you can download the talk and the slides of it. So you do not have to do it now. But at the end, I also will show this again. But let us first have a look on the numbers. In the next slide, you see on the left hand side a graph from a publication of Charlotte Freitag from two years ago or so where she displayed. how the CO2 emissions have to be reduced according to the Paris Climate Agreement. And you see, the plot starts at 2020, and roughly we should decrease the carbon emissions globally by 90% until 2050. This is the blue area. You also see at the bottom a brown area that shows the part of the ICT sector due to these emissions. And in 2020, we are starting with roughly 3%. And Freitag and colleagues have assumed that this amount would stay constant. And they realized, okay, if it remains constant and we comply with the Paris Climate Agreement, then its relative share would rise to 35% in 2050. And this shows how important the emissions of the ICT sector will become in the future. And in particular, if you look at the real numbers here in the paper of Freitag et al., they assumed the share would remain constant. But as it has been said by the presentators before me, we are confronted with the rise of emissions and consumptions of the ICT sector. This is shown to the right. There a graph is shown that extrapolates the ICT electricity consumption until 2030. This paper is from 2015, so it’s rather old. And we must say that the error bars on these data are rather large. But the general trend is not doubted at all in the community. The energy consumption of the ICT sector will increase in the next year. years, in the next decades, and this is particularly caused by AI, for instance, or other technologies under development, augmented reality, smart cities, electromobility, e-fuels, and so on. And in our study, I mentioned, we focused on the smartphone. As you see in the next slide, this is a rather universal device, everybody is using it, everybody has a smartphone, so this might be a first exercise for us to see how we can comply with sustainability by using the smartphone in a correct way. And now the figures for the numbers for the smartphone use are very interesting, as you see on the next slide. Here the results of a study from CE-DEV from 2021 are shown, and they tried to qualify the electricity consumption of the smartphone sector in Europe, and realized that the major part is due to network traffic and data storage. European citizens dispose of more than 500 million smartphones, and they consumed 160 terawatts in 2020. 10 to 20 percent of that amount was due to tracking apps on your smartphone, so this is an important share, but the point I want to raise is that this number, this amount of energy, compares rather good with the solar power that was generated in Europe at the same time. So the electricity production of photovoltaics in Europe was about 150 terawatt hours. in 2020, and this is a rather comparable amount. So, this was important for myself, because I had been working on photovoltaics during my PhD thesis, and when we started that work, we were thinking that this photovoltaic energy can substitute the energy consumption in households, in industry, and so on. Now, a totally new technology, smartphone technology, overtook and consumes all the energy that we were intending to be replacing fossil fuels. So, this should bring us to thinking. We looked on this from a more general perspective, from the UN Sustainable Development Goals, as you can see on the next slide. In our study, we identified 10 of those 17 sustainable development goals to be of relevance for the smartphone user. And in general, we look for SDG 13, for instance, to combat climate change, or take climate action, but we realized that much more sustainable development goals are relevant for every smartphone user, which have to be considered in order when you want to use your smartphone in a sustainable fashion. So, what I like to recommend is, given on the next slide, for every smartphone user, that you should follow a kind of process, step by step, where you improve from step to step the sustainability of your smartphone usage. It starts with very simple points, and you may switch off your Wi-Fi whenever you don’t need it, and you may switch off your geolocalization whenever you do not need it. And it will be of interest for you to monitor the progress, especially for point one, by looking regularly at the battery consumption. This is to be found in your smartphone and preferences. So and if you want to go further and want to reduce the energy consumption of your smartphone further, then you should consider to change the search engine, start page or Ecosia and Quant you may use instead. You can change your browser to use Firefox or Brave. And then you have fantastic Internet pages where all the preferences are indicated that you should apply. And the fifth level would be that you substitute some of the apps you are using. For instance, you can use Signal or Matrix or Threema instead of WhatsApp and so on. And you can use Mastodon instead of Twitter or X and Peertube instead of Pixel instead of YouTube, Pixelfed instead of YouTube and so on. And another step I would strongly recommend for you is to check out which data of your personally had been given to many of the institutions you are not aware of. And you find on this link I show here a formula where you can ask all these institutions which data from myself are you storing on your data centers. That’s very interesting. I strongly recommend to make use of that Internet page. And the last level would be when trying to make your smartphone usage more sustainable. Have a look for using alternative operating systems. Try to use EOS, the E operating system or Lineage OS or Ubuntu Touch. All these alternative operating systems are much less energy consuming than iOS or the Google Android. But these are only the recommendations I can give from our study for your personal settings at the smartphone. But this will not help to make the ICT sector more sustainable. This will help you to live more in harmony with your data privacy and sustainability. On the next slide I have shown the political measures that should be taken. And from our study we strongly recommend to make use of European products. Let’s say make Europe great again and engage for digital sovereignty of Europe. We have great hardware and software which has been developed here in Europe and many do not make use of that. We have sustainable smartphones developed like Fairphone, Shiftphone. And I would recommend for instance for the European Commission to consider to buy these phones instead of iPhones or Samsungs and so on. You can very precisely, very concretely make sustainability realized in your daily work. And then I would recommend from our study that alternative operating systems should be fostered politically by supporting iOS and others. And for instance by introducing open app stores so that we do not have to go to the Apple or to the Google app store to find the apps we are needing in our daily activities. Lifetime extension of smartphones. There are good initiatives going on. That is a moment where I would like to end. I can give good notes to the European Commission, that there are good initiatives underway and I strongly recommend to make use of real social media and to support them politically in top-down manner, so that you give good examples for NGOs, for other political institutions, by switching to real social media like Mastodon and Peertube instead of X, Twitter and YouTube. The last but the least but last point has been mentioned in Martina’s presentation already. I was glad to hear that future politics will be central human, that’s a great development, I do not have to comment on that and final point is support free and open source software, that’s what I mentioned in the beginning of this slide, there are great technologies that have been developed in Europe and we have to make use of it. Politics have to give a good example by using it and there can be much more done than so far. So on the last slide you see the QR code again by which you can download this presentation. I thank you very much for listening and for your interest in our work. I have other slides to be shown but this can be shown in the discussion when I think some questions will come up. Thank you for your attention.

Karen Mulberry:
Thank you very much. Now we’ll move on to our panel discussion. I know we have two questions that were posted in the chat but to start I have Discussant who is an IEEE young professional who had a question to start the panel discussion. Then I will move on to the two questions that were posed in the chat and any other questions that people online or in the room might have. So, Yann, let me turn to you first for your question.

Audience:
Hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can, thank you. Yeah, so hello everyone and greetings from the IEEE Young Professional Community and also leading the Climate and Sustainability Task Force. Because currently, the Young Professional Network is also a self-sufficient ecosystem that we are connecting all the young professionals and young practitioners in technology, engineering, especially in the energy and environmentally related issues. So to the current established network within the IEEE. And actually, currently, we are leading a lot of exciting work. In terms of the AI, we are collaborating with Sustainable Energy for All, a guidebook on the AI’s application in energy transition. And within this guidebook, we also mentioned a lot about not only AI for energy transition, but the AI’s environmental impact and towards its sustainability. So my question towards our future work and also to the panelists, especially to Martina Barbero, because we would like to ask, what are the areas in relation to the emerging technology and sustainability for which further work is needed to achieve the EU climate neutrality in 2050? And how can the whole community, like our Young Professional Community, can support this work and get your guidance? And thank you. This is my question.

Karen Mulberry:
Thank you.

Martina Barbero:
Thank you very much for the question. It is truly a very good question. I think we have seen from the presentation, not only mine, but also from the other panelists, there is a lot of things that can be done. From the European Commission perspective, the single most important thing for the next Commission would be to really start ensuring that implementation of the different tools we have available at our disposal goes well. So before launching anything new, we really need to make sure that whatever we have works. And I think we will also take up on some of the suggestions in terms of, for instance, decentralization of social media and other of those aspects. These are really important aspects, but there is nothing new that needs to be done as such in the short term. What we really want to make sure is that the different regulatory and policy instruments work well together in a cohesive manner, that they’re implemented right, and that if there is any gap, then we identify those gaps. And we really value the input of the community in that respect, especially for identifying gaps and for identifying any issue with the implementation that we should be aware of. Because it’s nice to have a lot of things on paper, but then they need to be translated into reality to really get us to the net zero in 2040. So this is what we hope for the next Commission as a priority.

Karen Mulberry:
Thank you very much. Any of the other speakers want to respond to that question? If not, I’d like to move on then to the questions that were asked in the chat, and then we can open it up for other questions. Let me start with what I perceive is the easy one first. And that is what can be done to incentivize adoption of the right to repair? So Ziggy, I will start with you since you raised the right, the ability to repair. So let’s go with that.

Sigmund Kluckne:
I mean, there are plenty of, there are a few ways to incentivize the right to repair, of course. And that also applies to the question before. Vote correctly. in the sense of make sure that your vote counts on all levels and make sure that those that you are voting are actually for the right to repair and are planning to implement the right to repair in the country that you live. If that is at all a possibility, let’s put it that way. But other than that, I mean, I live in Austria and Austria has since about three years or four years an incentive that they actually say that here we have a certain amount of money. It’s in the millions. People can come to the government and ask for a voucher. And that voucher gives you half percent off for repairing your electronics in an authorized repair shop. So this is everything from a washing machine to your iPhone. If you if you break your display or if the electronics break from a dishwasher, you can actually use that voucher up to 200 euros or 50 percent. The city of Vienna is going a step further and also includes includes non-electronics, for example, bikes or anything that is on a sustainability level, very high, highly seen. So this would be a financial motivation, of course. And then, yeah, I mean, the last incentive is always that you can put in regulations that people can actually that is it is make it easier to actually do the repairs. There are, of course, popping up repair shops and community repair centers all around the globe, which is a great, great effect of all of this, I think. But overall, I think it’s it’s part of regulation, part is part incentive monetarily and otherwise. And of course, awareness raising is going to be one of the biggest challenges so that we go away from the from the throwaway society that we have been, I want to say, and go more towards into repairing, making sure that electronics are actually also repairable. Which is the other side of that coin is that companies who develop products also make their, for example, their manuals available or make it easier to repair and that we are not relying on sending it in to the specialists and pay a lot of money for it. So that would be my take on that.

Karen Mulberry:
Okay, thank you very much. Any of the other panelists have a comment. If not, I’d like to note that a statement that was put in the chat in terms of a upcoming session in Belgrade desk on me technology and sustainability on September 13 and 14 so thank you for noting that opportunity to continue the discussion on right to repair. Now let me move to the other question that I think is going to take a little bit more discussion. And that is, can you give me some examples of digital passport products and the process of obtaining one. In essence, how does one for obtain community product information on something specifically, you know, some examples. So, probably start with you Ziggy’s because you raise the password question, but it also is tied to AI and and supply chain so I would open it up for others to respond to as well.

Sigmund Kluckne:
I am not the expert on that. So I have to have to bring that up front. As far as I know, the commission just recently decided on the product categories. So the actual, the actual EU regulation on the digital product passport has been developed but it’s not in implemented as of yet. So I don’t think that there are any products out there. Right now, there may be a few example products. I don’t know if Martina, maybe you know more, but that’s probably of completely different directorates. So, but I do know that France has had a similar regulation in place for a longer. So I would assume that there are much more examples from the French perspective. However, I don’t have any access or information on that specific. But maybe somebody in the audience could also allude a little bit to that if there’s anybody knowing, knowledgeable there.

Karen Mulberry:
Do we have any other?

Sigmund Kluckne:
It is upcoming, that’s a lot.

Karen Mulberry:
I mean, I know that there’s a lot of discussion occurring on what the digital passport means, how it would be applied, especially through a supply chain kind of view. So we have an open item that can use some, I guess, more information and more discussion. Now to move along, there is another question in the chat further to the question about 5G sustainability. Like to ask the panelists view on the role of standardization in influencing and supporting the sustainability of emerging technologies, such as the next generation of wireless networks, 6G. So who would like to respond to that question?

Martina Barbero:
I’m happy to maybe very briefly acknowledge this is a very good question. And I also appreciate Henriette’s question earlier, linking the sustainability aspects to the inclusivity aspects standardization, because this is a bit what we’re talking about as well. From European Commission perspective, this is something that it’s very important to really be more conscious of whichever we put forward as a new standard. in terms of emission impacts and also from a new waste perspective even. This is something that we haven’t seen happening all across the board, across all standard-making organizations, but there are some very good efforts in this direction. And we will only know if these efforts work if we invest even more into that, and if we make it kind of an obligation or a criteria to be taken into account. But from the preliminary feedback we’ve heard, this is really like a new aspect that is really carefully considered by many of the standard-making organizations, and in the context of 5G and 6G specifically. So I think we have high hopes that the new standards will be much more environmentally friendly than the old one, and therefore that will help us drive the green transformation forward. So this is a hope for sure, but we don’t have data to back it up yet, which brings me back to the point also of measuring the impact, and this is very important to keep working on methodologies for measuring an impact.

Karen Mulberry:
Okay, and Ziggy, do you want to articulate your response that you put in the chat on the right-to-repair aspect?

Sigmund Kluckne:
I was just going to say that France has the repairability index or repairability score that outlines how easy it is to repair a product that is on the market, which I think the website iFixit does that for a lot of the electronics as well, but France has required companies to actually also outline that in their products or marketing.

Karen Mulberry:
And maybe you can also address the question in terms of sustainability and standardization and how does one influence the other, since you’re engaged in some standardization work yourself.

Sigmund Kluckne:
Right, yeah. Very, very simply, simply spoken, I want to say that the more comparable, interoperable and compatible devices we have, especially with, you know, if you think about the plugs, the USB-C was a big deal, so that you can use one plug, one charger for a lot of different, for a lot of different devices, you didn’t have to use seven different plugs. That standard, that is a standard, the USB-C has been in development through the USB-C consortium and is now implemented by probably all or most electronics companies. And alone that, you don’t have so many cables in itself, or that you don’t have to have so many cables, is a sustainability feat, right, you don’t need so many plugs and cables. But then of course, you also have standardizations where you can say, okay, this is comparable. So that if a company builds a product based on standards, versus a company that builds a product that’s not based on standards, all of the different standards-based products are comparable in how they have been designed, what they have, what features they have built in. So you can be much more aware of the product impact. And I think that also comes back to the digital product passport. So yeah, I think that’s pretty much what my response would be.

Karen Mulberry:
Okay, thank you.

Sigmund Kluckne:
I’m happy for others to also join in here.

Karen Mulberry:
Yes, Mario has a comment, and then I have a question from the participants in the audience here. So Mario, over to you.

Mario Birkholz:
Yeah, thank you. I’d like to come back to the question of the passport or repairability. In fact, that’s a very important point. I think we can look at it also from another perspective. We were at the moment only talking about new products, but the most sustainability we can practice is to avoid buying a new product and using an old one. And this brings me back to what I saw, what I presented in the talk, that we have great software developed in Europe, which is Linux. And on many old laptops, you can install Linux because the new versions of Windows or others do not work anymore. But if you install Linux, you can bring to work 10 years, 15 years old laptops, which are lying somewhere and no one is working with them. So this is another aspect of sustainability, reuse things. And the emergence of this technology is that the Linux system is constantly further developed. So this is nothing spectacular, like an AI revolution or so. This is steady work that we can rely on. And this also would help us very severely to achieve sustainability within the ICT sector.

Karen Mulberry:
Okay, thank you.

Audience:
And Walt, over to you and your question. Yes, thank you, Karen. My name is Walton Atres and I represent here at the Dynamic Coalition on Internet Standards, Security and Safety, which is not so relevant, but I need to mention it. I’d like to bring you to the Netherlands where this, I don’t know, it’s 2022, 2023, that we found that the government, they gave subsidies for huge wind farms in the Netherlands on land in remote areas. And then what the national newspaper found is that large corporations came in, bought a local counselor, flew him into Seattle twice. And then all of a sudden, they had agreement to build huge server parks in this remote area of the Netherlands. And it started in the Northwest, where all of a sudden there was a server park, all the green energy went into the server park and not to the local population as it was meant to do. And the large corporations could say, we are running our server park on green energy. But then this national newspaper found out that it happened in the Northwest, in the east of the country. And then the national government became alerted and one of them was stopped because the energy was subsidized for the local people and not for large server parks. So this is a question to Professor Bierkholz, because you mentioned that the parity between the two, which was quite shocking on the renewable energy and the mobile phone industry, but also to the lady from Martina from the European Commission, shouldn’t there be more oversight on how renewable energy is used and what it is used for? Because if everything goes into server parks, then we will not have a transition, I think. So thank you.

Karen Mulberry:
All right. I’ll wait for the panelists to respond, please.

Mario Birkholz:
Yeah. That’s a very good point. I was also thinking that this is a critical aspect when Martina Barbero reported about the goal of zero emission of data centers in 2050. That’s a good goal. Definitely. Yeah. We do not have too much to discuss about it. On the other hand, we also should look for a more broader perspective that the regeneratively produced electricity is also used for other applications, for let’s say the non-ICT or the normal applications. And this, I also would agree, is difficult with a goal that only data centers should be zero-emitting. This calls for a change in the policy goals, from my opinion.

Karen Mulberry:
Any other comments from the panelists?

Martina Barbero:
Yeah, just to mention that, I think I spoke about the EU being zero net emission by 2040, not the data center specifically, but I think what Wout also spoke about is something that we were conscious of, which is a bit of greenwashing, that sometimes we see, you know, I’m picking an example just randomly, but there are some DNS hosting providers now that claim to be green. And what they mean by that is basically they take renewable energies to sustain their activities, but then the definition of renewable energies in some cases includes, you know, not entirely renewable energies, that really depends on how people conceive it. So the point is, absolutely, and that’s why I’m trying to convey the message that we need to look at the big picture, and how everything comes together and spot these areas where issues are, to be able to address them more effectively. But yeah, maintaining the big picture thinking is important in this case.

Karen Mulberry:
Okay, thank you very much. That was our last question, because we’re out of time. So what I’d like to do is thank everyone for participating in the discussion. As everyone has noted, that sustainability and emerging technology and just technology in general can be compatible. There are a lot of things to consider, you know, in terms of, can you replace a battery? What is the process around identifying each step and where does it come from on each step? Is that sustainable? There’s a lot of work to be done. There will always, I think, be a lot of work to be done to ensure that when you develop something it is sustainable, that it does contribute to the circular economy in some fashion. It brings us back to some comments in terms of, you know, a standard to replace batteries would be helpful. So I know that Ziggy and the groups that he’s leading for Planet Positive are talking about a lot of different efforts and recommending different standards and areas to move this forward in a more global fashion so that when you have something that’s built to a standard it can be sustainable and it can be circular. So thank you very much for joining us and I look forward to further discussions on this topic.