As part of the European Green Week 2022, on May 31, 2022, Digital for Planet (D4P) organised the “Green Digital for Sustainable Transformation” workshop to raise the attention on sustainable digital technologies among the total 300 partner events organised in 35 countries across Europe and beyond. The D4P workshop gathered top experts from industry, academia, and policymakers with the aim to discuss and showcase solutions that will allow our society to harness green digital technologies and reach the European Green Deal objectives.
Dr. Monique Calisti, the President of D4P and CEO of Martel Innovate, opened the workshop by welcoming the audience and introducing the line-up of speakers of the day.
Dr. Calisti yielded the floor to Ms. Almut Nagel, policy officer on the Green Digital Transformation at the European Commission. Following a brief introduction of the current Commission priorities on the twin transition, Ms. Nagel presented the opportunities and challenges related to Green/Digital Twin Transformation in Europe. Often the debate about the role of digital technologies in sustainable development gets stuck when the attention is brought to the footprint of the ICT sector – which accounts 2.1 and 3.9% of global GhG emissions – and the fast-growing eWaste. She urged to find science-based methods to measure the net contribution of digital to the environment and, eventually, maximise the benefits of sustainable digital technologies.
Subsequently, Ms. Nagel provided an overview of the actions pursued by the European Commission toward more sustainable digital technologies such as the advancement of low-power processors, software and AI, as well as greener electronics communications by 2030. The urgency to bring stakeholders together is key, Ms. Nagel pointed out and mentioned the EU-supported initiative European Green Digital Coalition (EGDC) which gathers ICT companies to develop methods and tools to measure the net impact of green digital technologies on the environment. Find out more here.
The floor passed to Rahul Tomar, co-founder of DigitalTwin Technology and Dr. Giovanni Rimassa, CIO of Martel Innovate who shared what their organisations are doing to advance sustainable digital technologies and tackle the environmental challenges.
Mr. Tomar called attention to the high energy consumption of Artificial Intelligence on GPU, not initially meant for this purpose. Therefore, he spoke about the Digital Twin Technology‘s projects which focus on turning digital technologies more energy-efficient.
The second panelist, Dr. Rimassa, presented some sustainable use cases in Martel’s portfolio of ICT projects. “Sustainability is at the core,” he said while adding “we bring together organisations with the same goal: solve global climate challenges by working on innovative research projects”. The partners of the EU-funded H-CLOUD project, for example, have the ambition to tackle crucial problems in the cloud computing community such as the climate neutrality of data centres and sustainability of the verticals.
After a lively panel session and several questions from the audience, Dr. Monique Calisti wrapped up the work. She briefly presented the Digital for Planet association and its activities to support the development and adoption of sustainable digital technologies among its members and beyond. “It’s important to create synergies and bridges to allow collaboration to happen. Only then we will be able to tackle the environmental challenges and save the planet. We need to work together”, Dr. Calisti claimed in the conclusion of the D4P’s EU Green Week 2022 Partner Event.
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