Digitalization and decarbonization go hand in hand

This year the UN Climate Change Conference, COP29, took place in Baku, Azerbaijan. The aim of the COP process is for governments to agree on concrete steps to address climate change. A series of days were dedicated to specific topics including energy, nature, and education. For the first time in COP, there was also a day dedicated to digitalization - recognizing the significant role that digital can play in combatting climate change.

Maximizing our handprint and minimizing our footprint

Collaboration, enhanced connectivity and digitalization are critical as we look to mitigate and adapt to climate change. For this reason, Nokia has participated in a couple of COPs over the past four years. A two-person team from Nokia joined this COP to continue to drive the dialogue on the critical role of technology and digitalization in climate issues, as well as discussing the positive impact of technology on industries and society (the handprint of digitalization), and the importance of constantly minimizing the footprint of the technology itself by looking to break the traditional links between the growth in data and growth in energy use. This is why we were proud to endorse the ITU declaration on green digital action, underscoring the important role of digital technologies in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

AI: with great power comes great responsibility

Whilst in Baku, Pia Tanskanen and I saw that a lot of the conversations there focused on that handprint/ footprint dynamic – how do we break the traditional link between the growth in data and the growth in energy use, especially with the increased opportunities and energy demand that we see with AI and data centers. At Nokia, we look at this issue from two angles. Firstly, there are risks, but also opportunities in the growing use of AI. Networking technologies such as digital twins, low latency connectivity, analytics and AI can help hard-to-abate sectors find ways to accelerate sustainability efforts. Digitalization can support all industries on their decarbonization journey. At the same time, to ensure the benefits of digitalization continue to outweigh the climate impacts of digital infrastructure, the digital industry must also continually reduce its own footprint.

Secondly, the energy demands that AI places on the grid will differ depending on the use cases that AI is being used for. AI is a vital tool for us at Nokia and it comes in different forms. On the one hand we are using AI in a range of our products and services, helping our customers reduce their energy consumption. On the other hand, we are also using it in our daily work internally within Nokia, ranging from chatbot interfaces for product documentation to automated test case development. The most popular use-cases are Information Retrieval using Retrieval Augmented Generation – RAG, and Programming Support. We have recorded as much as 70 percent reduction of manual tasks in some of these use-cases, freeing up time to work on more productive matters.  

Either way, just as with some other types of technology, it can help others decarbonize but must also be continually optimized from an energy and resource efficiency perspective. Enabling our handprint and minimizing our footprint is an approach that’s applicable across digital technology.   

Key outcomes

When it comes to the outcomes from COP 29, the main headlines from the “finance COP” were :

• Triple finance to developing countries, from the previous goal of USD 100 billion annually, to USD 300 billion annually by 2035.
• Secure efforts of all actors to work together to scale up finance to developing countries, from public and private sources, to the amount of USD 1.3 trillion per year by 2035.

The sums involved were too low for some and too high for others, and there will be further work on this in Brazil next year at the next COP. As Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, said “No country got everything they wanted, and we leave Baku with a mountain of work to do.”

In other areas, we saw advances in transparent climate reporting a support programme for the implementation of National Adaptation Plans.

The adoption of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement so soon into the COP proceedings could lead to a UN-backed global carbon market. This is important to us at Nokia as in February this year we announced our commitment to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 – accelerating not only our net zero target, but also our interim 2030 targets to help us get there. Key levers in our net zero pathway include product design and innovation, low-carbon electricity, and energy and material efficiency. Credible, permanent carbon removals and storage may be required to neutralize some residual emissions to reach net zero.

Perfect is the enemy of good

The COP process isn’t perfect, but nothing is. As humans, we face many challenges as we look to mitigate and adapt to climate change but, collectively, we go further together than we can on our own. We look forward to the innovation and positive impact digital technologies will bring to bear on climate and social challenges. We also await successful implementation of the outcomes of COP29 and anticipate even greater leaps forward in COP30 in Belem, Brazil.