2023-11-26 08:00:59
We have entered the “decisive decade” with organizations and governments seeking solutions to meet this aspiration. As John Gardner, a former US health secretary, said: “We find the most astonishing opportunities in the midst of seemingly insurmountable problems.” The challenges presented by climate change are daunting, terrifying even, and yet the changes we all need to make in order to protect the planet and become more resilient offer us fabulous opportunities to improve. For many leaders, the goal has become twofold: modernize their businesses using more digital tools, while creating a more sustainable world.
To understand how organizations are managing the transition, AWS partnered with Atos to conduct a study through Coleman Parkes Research to learn how leaders are approaching decarbonization. 4,000 business leaders from several sectors (energy and utilities, financial services and manufacturing) in four European countries (France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom) were questioned on the progress made during these last years : how they are reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the challenges they face, and how they are investing in finding solutions and considering the role of digital technology – particularly the “cloud” – to advance their decarbonization .
The results show that 80% of companies, across all sectors and sizes, currently measure their carbon footprint and that almost all of them (96%) have set emissions reduction targets to reduce their impact. 75% of European companies are confident they can achieve their sustainability goals, although there are gaps between this belief and reported levels of success. Indeed, in France, 46% of companies consider data fragmentation to be one of the main obstacles to reducing their carbon footprint.
Only 14% of business leaders have decarbonization goals supported by science. Companies do not always have the tools necessary to measure emissions comprehensively. Unsurprisingly, scope 1 emissions (according to the GHG protocol) from direct operations linked to the use of fossil fuels, and scope 2 emissions, including purchased electricity, are easier to quantify and are measured by 76% of companies. According to the study, only 9% of companies attempt to estimate harder-to-quantify scope 3 emissions, also known as value chain emissions, which often account for the majority of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. ) of an organization.
According to respondents, digital technologies can bridge the gap between companies’ expectations of sustainable practices and what corresponds to business reality. The compartmentalization of data sources has been cited as an obstacle preventing better management of GHG emissions. 75% of business decision-makers recognize the role of technology in decarbonization and believe that their environmental impact reporting might be improved via an emissions measurement tool.
Significantly, the majority of executives (77%) believe that cloud technologies accelerate the transition to net-zero by 2 years or more. The cloud first of all provides a solution for pooling IT resources and is therefore “the common transport of IT” in a way. Furthermore, it allows you to only consume the resource you need and no more. Last but not least, it makes powerful and innovative tools very easily available (big data, artificial intelligence, IoT, digital twins and even simulation); it puts these tools within everyone’s reach at an affordable price and without an entry ticket. All these tools, if used soberly and responsibly, help companies achieve sustainability goals.
Let’s take the example of the solution from the company METRON. This French Energy Efficiency ClimateTech has chosen to host its solutions on the cloud to meet its technological requirements (big data, IoT, AI, etc.) and support its international development. The start-up supports companies in reducing their energy consumption and their carbon footprint thanks to its SaaS software platform, hosted on the AWS cloud. Thus, customers benefit from an innovative solution which makes it possible to find solutions to optimize energy performance, in order to optimally achieve their decarbonization objectives.
Indeed, despite the undeniable benefits of cloud computing (on-demand, elastic, automatable, affordable, global, etc.) today and in the years to come, around a fifth of organizations have not yet adopted it. Some business leaders are beginning to realize how technology and sustainability are linked. It seems crucial to us to put in place real, effective, precise digital tools, in a spirit of responsible digital technology, to achieve environmental objectives on time. Advancing the digital revolution is a decisive factor for companies to truly become more sustainable in order to support Europe’s ecological transition.
It is with this in mind that Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge in 2019: a promise to achieve net zero emissions by 2040, ten years earlier than the Paris Agreement. Since then, more than 400 companies have signed The Climate Pledge.
We all realize that signing a pledge is only the beginning of implementing change. The first step on this journey is to understand where we are and what we can improve. We all need to have a clear view of our carbon emissions, we need to understand the barriers to decarbonization, and we need to be clear on what to prioritize.
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