Jan Mühlfeit

Weather vs. climate? Information technologies as a solution or a problem? Low carbon vs. low tax? Individual vs. corporate responsibility? Well, those are only some of the tough questions that we try to find answers to when my colleagues and I spend time thinking about and discussing the topic of environmental sustainability. We look at this basically from two main angles – how the information technologies can help to solve it and how our industry can help to keep it on top of the global agenda. At the same time I feel that we as well as the actual participants of the recent COP15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, have to be honest and admit that expectations for this major event were simply unrealistic. Just like in business or sports, when you set goals are that way beyond of what you can achieve, the failure is unfortunately almost guaranteed.

Indeed, the environmental sustainability is a big challenge for everyone. It is a global problem that will require global hat and a global mindset. Yet when it comes to addressing it, many politicians still tend to look at it purely from their national perspectives. While for example roughly 80% of world’s coal power plants are based in India and China and hence these two major players are often labeled as major offenders, they in return have their very fair points too as when you start to compare pollution per capita or pollution generated “to-date”, over the past number of decades, the developed world has clearly been responsible for much bigger negative impact on our global environment. And again, we also have to look at this issue with realistic expectations. While European Union’s triple goal of the “20-20-20” initiative for 2020, which means a saving of 20% of the Union's primary energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the inclusion of 20% of renewable energies in energy consumption, is great, even if the entire Europe “shut-down”, it would only solve about 10-12% of the global CO2 emissions problem.

I am a strong believer that when it comes to resolving the challenge of environmental sustainability, information technologies will have a major positive role to play. While IT is also part of the problem and its carbon footprint represents about 2% of the total (caused typically by relatively high power consumption in datacenters and server farms), I have no doubt that our industry’s positive impact will be significantly higher. When you start to analyze drivers of the remaining 98% of the issue, you quickly realize that about 40% of CO2 footprint is caused by housing. That’s exactly an area, where technologies can tremendously help whether in building smart electricity grids or producing smart home appliances that turn itself on and off based on peak and off-peak hours and thanks to their software have improved power consumption capabilities in general.

In fact I am also convinced that this particular space also represents a real opportunity for Czech home appliances producers, an area in which we have historically excelled not only in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc. Now should be the time for such companies to invest heavily into innovation, and inclusion of smart software elements into their newly launched products. Not only I believe that this is now a great market opportunity, equally I think that in a few years time, such features will become a must. While many governments are already setting themselves various environment-related targets, such as the already mentioned EU’s “20-20-20” or the 1,000 U.S. mayors who have agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the cities where the majority of Americans live, I am sure that many will also start to introduce and institute green purchasing standards which will impact virtually every industry and product.

Both at Microsoft and in many international organizations in which I happen to represent our corporation, thousands of very smart individuals are already thinking how (obviously not only our) industry can help governments address this major global challenge of our century. Internally, we have dedicated many of our brightest brains to make sure that we, too, lead by example. We have set ourselves a bold goal of reducing our own carbon footprint by over 30% by 2012 all thru our improved corporate environmental practices, such as more efficient data center operations, reducing transportation, using renewable power, efficient design of office buildings or waste reduction. More importantly however, our software design engineers spend a lot of time looking into how we can help our customers, both in public and private sectors, achieve their own environmental goals. This is where as I have noted IT will have a major role to play in not only reducing the energy required to run software and hardware, but also in using technology to reduce travel, driving changes in transportation, using software to drive scientific knowledge, visualizing the impact of climate change or helping our customers to manage and measure their own carbon footprint.

One particular solution which we already launched in close partnership with the European Environmental Agency and that I am very proud of is the so-called “Eye On Earth”. Available at http://www.eyeonearth.eu in 28 European languages, the Eye On Earth provides 500 million of European Union’s citizens with online access to real-time data about quality of Europe’s more than 22,000 bathing sites together with data from over 1,000 air quality monitoring stations throughout the continent. By bringing together scientific information, visualizing it in a very user-friendly way as well as allowing for direct user feedback and comparison with observations of ordinary citizens, I think Eye On Earth is a flagship of what technologies can do in this arena and a way to go for our industry as a whole. In fact let me here quote Ms Jacqueline McGlade, Executive Director of the European Environmental Agency who on the occasion of its launch said “Our environment is changing. We all notice small differences where we live or regularly visit. Eye On Earth gives all of us the opportunity to inform and be informed of such changes. The Microsoft technology behind Eye On Earth makes environmental information much more accessible. As more people understand what’s happening in their area, more will contribute to solving environmental problems.”

While not biggest in the world in its size, the European Union now has a unique opportunity to become a leader in leveraging the smart IT solutions to tangibly address the global environmental issues and to help to present this agenda to the public in a way that will help to battle the green fatigue. Yet as we all know, strategy without execution is merely an illusion. So let us make sure that compared for example to the Lisbon agenda that we set on improving competitiveness and later found very difficult to deliver against, we do a better job in making this one real. It’s a time to walk the talk.