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BT
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Today we celebrate #Digitalisation Day at #COP29
This year marks a historic milestone at COP with the introduction of #Digitalisation Day on 16 November 2024. For the first time, the critical role of digital technologies in climate action will be officially recognised through the adoption of a Declaration. This Declaration will highlight the importance of digitalisation in advancing sustainability and outline a collaborative framework for future efforts.
At BT Group, we’ve long understood the potential of ICT to reduce carbon emissions and drive the transition to a low-carbon economy.
We’re aiming to be net zero for our operations by end-March 2031 and for our full value chain by end-March 2041.
Our networks, products, and services offer significant opportunities to help our customers reduce their emissions. From supporting the decarbonisation of the grid to enhancing the energy efficiency of our products, we’re committed to making a difference.
During Digitalisation Day at COP29, the critical role of digital technologies in climate action will be officially recognised for the first time.
In FY24, we also reduced our global energy consumption by 140 GWh, a 4% decrease. In the last year alone, we helped our customers avoid over 1.5 million tonnes of carbon emissions, bringing the total to nearly 3.8 million tonnes avoided since 2021. This achievement is largely due to our full fibre rollout, which reduces the need for personal and work-related travel.
We’ve expanded our Carbon Network Dashboard to give business customers visibility of electricity consumption and carbon emissions at an individual workload and application level. The insight will allow them to optimise their data-centre and network infrastructure to manage emissions as they adopt AI applications at scale.
AI can have significantly different impacts on networks and data-centres than other application types. It can cause sharp, unpredictable increases in bandwidth demand, which can in turn cause spikes in power use by infrastructure traditionally designed for predictable workloads. If spikes in demand overload individual network devices or servers, this will not only impact performance but cause them to overheat, wasting electricity. This creates additional challenges for customers aiming to reduce emissions.
The Carbon Network Dashboard already offers a single, end-to-end, near real-time view of how much electricity a customer’s network and data-centre infrastructure is using. It can now tie this consumption to traffic patterns caused by individual applications, including AI.
As part of its sustainable network design and refresh service, this insight can be used to help customers adapt, either by changing network design, capacity and management or optimising applications and AI workloads. It can also help customers develop distributed architectures, which bring components of AI closer to users, devices and machines. Find out more here: BT helps customers keep a lid on AI carbon emissions
Our Digital Carbon Calculator is another tool we offer to help customers understand and manage their carbon footprint. This tool provides insights into the carbon impact of network devices, servers, and endpoint devices, helping customers identify opportunities for optimisation and potential cost savings.
We partner with Johnson Controls to bring smart building technology to businesses in the UK and internationally. This technology allows for the digital monitoring, analysis, and optimisation of energy use in workplaces, helping customers achieve net zero faster while reducing operating costs.
We are dedicated to ensuring that our networks and the essential services they enable are accessible to as many people as possible across the UK.
Digitalisation is key to unlocking a sustainable future, and we invite you to join us in celebrating #Digitalisation Day and working towards a brighter, greener world.
We’re part of the ITU #Green Digital Action initiative to advance sustainability through digital innovation.
By fostering international partnerships and coordination, Green Digital Action aims to position the ICT sector as a leader in climate action and an enabler for other sectors to engage in critical sustainability efforts. Find out more here: About us - Green Digital Action
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Great to see the first Digitalization day at this COP! Let's hope it becomes a tradition
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Impressive tools for tackling emissions in real time