Are green and digital compatible?
Throughout 2025, the International Telecommunications Union celebrates its 160th anniversary. Its modern digital mandate touches earth, sea and sky.
This blog about greening the digital sector is part of a series for International Geneva examining ITU’s contribution to pressing global issues, set in a city with a long tradition of multilateral cooperation
We’ve long heard: Save trees, don’t print lengthy documents, and put them online. From energy-efficient programmes for homes and businesses, to water-saving irrigation measures, digital technologies make us more productive, trim our carbon footprint and reduce waste.
Digital solutions speed up improvements in education, hunger, poverty, and climate action. Yet those same technologies have a flip side, too.
For a long time, most people did not associate digital use with high energy and water use to run and cool data centres, nor think about where old computers go to rest. Even now, as we tap into smart transport systems, large language models, blockchain technologies, or even social media videos, we’re not fully aware of the environmental trade-offs.
Digital experts are starting to take a hard look at partnerships to dramatically slash emissions and e-waste.
It’s not easy being green
The digital sector accounts for up to 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions and 62 billion kilogrammes of e-waste every year. The way things are going now, the numbers will only go up. As AI computational power doubles every 100 days, the energy to run AI tasks grows 26%-36% annually.
Greening Digital Companies 2024, an ITU-World Benchmarking Alliance report, tracks the environmental impact of 200 leading digital companies, assessing their environmental targets, commitments and transparency. It monitors their energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and identifies key recommendations and policies that governments can take to help businesses lighten their value chain footprint with innovations in energy markets, modern power grids, and renewable energy investments.
Lighter, together
ITU’s Green Digital Action initiative urges companies to commit to scalable solutions and monitor them in a common way. Without seriously tracking emissions and waste, the industry lacks data to make serious changes.
Much is in the hands of industry leaders. Businesses need to take centre stage in cutting emissions and reducing waste. They are off to a good start, with major digital companies committing to science-based targets and reporting annually to ITU.
Nearly 2000 companies, universities and industry associations, along with 82 nations, have endorsed the COP29 Declaration on Green Digital Action. This milestone commitment addresses resilient digital infrastructure, e-waste management, country support with accents on youth and women, disaster mitigation, regulations, green digital solutions, sustainable innovation finance and sustainable consumer practices.
For the next UN climate talks at COP30, ITU is urging business and government to update national climate pledges (Nationally Determined Contributions under the 2015 Paris Agreement) and national adaptation plans with stronger green digital action.
Meanwhile, standards development leaders based in Geneva aim to mitigate AI’s environmental impact, emphasizing three “Es”: energy efficiency, e-waste management and emissions reduction. They have combined forces in the World Standards Cooperation, consisting of the International Electrotechnical Commission, the International Organization for Standardization, and ITU.
The Digital Impact Alliance (part of Green Digital Action) offered guidance in a flagship report at COP29. The Green Digital Action initiative includes a green computing working group that tackles tough issues of AI and data centres. ITU’s Innovation Factory pitch competition rewards startups producing AI solutions to drive climate action.
Youth look for green batons
More than 55% of the world’s population is under 35 years of age. Digital tools are part of their past, present and future. And more than 70% want to see climate action.
It stands to reason that young people want a much lighter footprint for digital technologies. They reiterated this message at ITU’s latest Global Youth Summit in March 2025.
In the relay race to restore our planet’s health, young people ask for today’s leaders to pass them green batons. It’s time for digital companies especially to step up the pace.
Brains, supercomputers and green AI trade-offsIn the AI battle between prosperity and planet, Switzerland’s leading newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), reports on the latest trends in tackling AI energy consumption. Most of today’s AI runs on chips that were originally designed to speed up image generation in computer games and are based on graphics processing units (GPUs). AI uses these chips as well as dedicated software architecture. But the energy costs are high. Training and operating AI has led to large data centres now consum-ing as much electricity as small towns, says the NZZ. An AI-focused data centre uses as much elec-tricity as 100,000 households, and data centres under construction will consume 20 times more electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. Scientists have an energy-efficient alternative: neuromorphic chips. The human brain only uses as much energy as a light bulb for its computing, by tapping efficiently into its neural network. Neu-romorphic chips similarly use little energy and are being successfully piloted in transport logistics and drug research. Neuromorphic chips are used with neuromorphic computers, which work like the brain. Artificial neurons switch themselves on only when they receive an input. But while the energy efficiency is exceptional, the computing power is not yet fast enough for training large language models. Researchers are currently testing techniques where AI requests are handled by a small part of the AI model, to improve responsiveness. Setting up neuromorphic ecosystems would be a major shift for the digital industry. But the current GPU-based system has operated with the mentality of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” With the sky-rocketing energy use due to AI, that is no longer an option. |
Shrinking the AI footprint: Learn more at AI for GoodAre you looking for insights and partners to reduce the AI footprint on our planet? Join ITU’s day-long workshop, Navigating the intersect of AI, environment and energy for a sustainable future (10 July, Palexpo) at the AI for Good Summit. The event explores energy, water and material in the typical AI system lifecycle, and innovations to counter AI’s growing footprint. These include better chips, architecture and algorithms, renewable energy sources and sustainable data centre practices. Sessions also cover standards, policies and regulations for greener AI, and how the digital sector can scale up action to reduce its emissions. |