The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources has been accelerated by the urgent need to combat climate change and the increasing economic viability of renewable technologies. – Written by Seref Doğan Erbek
The carbon market, a key tool in the fight against climate change, is undergoing significant evolution, from growing voluntary participation to a possible future where carbon credits are traded on stock exchanges. – Written by Seref Doğan Erbek
Sustainable built environments are not just about buildings; they encompass the entire built environment, including transportation systems, open spaces, and communities. – Written by Seref Doğan Erbek
In 2023, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy use reached their highest levels on record, according to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA).- Written by Seref Dogan Doğan
In line with the increasing deployment of renewable energy projects worldwide, jobs in the sector are also surging — and China is far and away the top employer within the space. – Written by Seref Dogan Doğan
As temperatures rise, natural disasters become more frequent and intense, and sea levels continue to rise, emerging countries face a range of threats that could have devastating consequences. – Written by Seref Dogan Doğan
While they are at the heart of the cloud revolution currently unleashing the potential of the internet, data centers are also notorious climate polluters. The sector has received immense scrutiny for years due to its resource-gobbling operations and significant concerns over the ecological impact it has on local communities.
However, a recent report by McKinsey suggests that data center operations, at least in on-premises applications, may be a smaller concern relative to the substantial emissions from enterprise technology.
According to the report, corporate devices flood the earth’s climate with about 400 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent gases. Overall, enterprise tech emissions total roughly 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions – or, to put this in context, the equivalent of the United Kingdom’s total carbon emissions.
I think that with the increasing pressure on companies and large corporations for more substantial action on climate and sustainability issues, the McKinsey report could hardly have come at a worse time. Nevertheless, the data holds an advantage for companies willing to put in the work on climate issues. As McKinsey note, “progress on climate change requires action on many fronts, and enterprise technology offers an important option that CIOs and companies can act on quickly.” I’ll look a bit more closely at this data below and the implications it raises.
End-user devices such as smartphones, laptops, printers, and tablets are the biggest culprit in enterprise tech emissions. Altogether, they emit between 1.5 and 2.0 times more carbon than data centers. There are a few reasons why this is the case.
First, corporate end-user devices are significantly more – and proliferate much quicker – than the servers in on-premises data centers. Employment booms, which have occurred often recently, typically cause device numbers to balloon, often on a one-to-one basis. Meanwhile, companies usually purchase servers and provision data centers based on forecasts of current and near-future use, and therefore need to upscale infrequently.
Second, end-user devices have a shorter refresh cycle than on-premises servers. For instance, smartphones typically get replaced in two years, while laptops and printers have refresh cycles of four and five years respectively. Meanwhile, servers get replaced every five years on average – and one in five companies wait even longer.
Third, and perhaps more importantly, emissions from corporate end-user devices are set to increase over the coming years at a CAGR of 12.8% yearly. This projected rise is driven by growing emissions from manufacturing, transportation, use, and disposal of these devices.
Consequently, taking action on enterprise end-user devices can be an effective way to quickly and sustainably slash corporate emissions. Some levers that companies may adopt include using energy-efficient devices, limiting the proliferation of these devices, exploring refurbished devices, and increasing product life span.
McKinsey also suggests that migrating from on-premises servers to “hyperscale” cloud-hosted computing may present one of the biggest emissions savings opportunities for companies. But can this provide the climate progress that companies need to establish their sustainability credentials?
While the drive towards sustainability through “hyperscale” data centers may yet bear fruit, the data center controversy continues to receive significant attention. According to figures quoted in the MIT Press Reader, the cloud now has a greater climate footprint than the aviation industry. Starkly put, “a single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.”
And what is perhaps most frustrating is that the substantial portion of this energy use does not even go to active computational processes – those take up only 6-12% – but instead to redundancies stacked upon redundancies needed to guarantee the now minimum 99% uptime required by cloud users.
Hopefully, moving to hyperscale data centers will markedly reduce the resource requirements of cloud computing. But only time will tell whether that will be the case.
After a minor COVID-induced drop, global energy investments rebounded to pre-pandemic levels in 2021 ($1.9 trillion) – an increase of 10% over 2020 – reports the International Energy Association (IEA). And in what will be music to the ears of policymakers and green energy advocates, much of the investment attention shifted from traditional fuel production to power generation and end-use sectors, with electricity attracting the lion’s share of renewable energy funding.
Amidst the tumult and uncertainty of the global pandemic, a strong theme advocated by governments and international agencies was the opportunity the crisis provided to “build back better.”
Indications from 2021 energy investments suggest that has been the case, at least as it concerns renewables. Here, I briefly discuss the extent of those investments and how they augur for a move towards net-zero and green economy.
Following projections that global energy demand would increase by 4.6% in 2021, energy financing experienced a general uptick as interest in infrastructure, and new projects surged during the year. Noting the upward trend in financing mid-2021, the IEA proposed that “the anticipated upswing in investments in 2021 is a mixture of a cyclical response to recovery and a structural shift in capital flows towards cleaner technologies.”
The IEA reports that global power sector investment accounted for a large chunk of 2021 energy spending, increasing by 5% to over $820 billion in 2021. Most of that financing ($530 billion) was directed toward new power generation; renewables accounted for over 70% of this amount. Asides from this, investors also saw more bang for their buck, with a dollar spent on wind and solar photovoltaic installations producing four times more electricity than ten years ago.
“Electrification was also a major driver of investment spending by final consumers,” says the IEA. “Electric vehicle sales continue to surge along with a proliferation of new model offerings by automakers, supported by fuel economy targets and zero-emissions vehicle mandates.”
In the same vein, BloombergNEF reported in January 2022 that the previous year saw a 27% rise in low carbon energy investments, with nearly half emanating from renewables investment in Asia. As a result, total yearly spend on energy transition was $755 billion, a new record in sustainable energy spending.
However, I must say that despite the encouraging short-term news, global energy investment has yet to breach the levels required to forestall climate disaster. The IEA also agrees, noting that “clean energy investment would need to double in the 2020s to maintain temperatures well below a 2°C rise and more than triple in order to keep the door open for a 1.5°C stabilisation.”
The big question, though, is where will that money come from? Blended finance might provide an answer.
Blended finance, a type of public-private partnership, combines public concessional funding with private investment to de-risk certain project types. As the World Bank puts it, “blended finance, which combines concessional public funds with commercial funds, can be a powerful means to direct more commercial finance toward impactful investments that are unable to proceed on strictly commercial terms.”
Renewable energy projects are frequently “constrained by investors’ perception of high risk and low returns,” Consequently, the flow of private capital into these projects is often halting. However, concessional financing in the form of debt, equity, or grants, appropriate risk-mitigation measures, and suitable seniority in terms of loss protection and the security of returns can make these projects attractive to investors.
The World Bank reports that blended finance could be vital in attracting larger investments in clean energy, and sub-Saharan Africa provides a model for how these partnerships can work.
Climate change is an increasingly costly, and deadly, event in countries around the world.
As the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reports, the past 50 years have seen some of the deadliest and most expensive disasters ever recorded. The period from 1970 to 2019 accounted for 50% of all climate-related disasters, 45% of reported deaths, and contributed 74% of economic loss ever suffered due to climate.
While the broad view of experts and regulatory agencies is that these weather and climate events are most likely to affect the most vulnerable, a term that would typically evoke images of at-risk people in emerging or developing economies, the spectrum of damage has also widened. People everywhere, from Russia to the US, Australia, China, India, and Chile, in urban and rural areas, are increasingly exposed to the debilitating economic and human costs of climate events.
While this reality underlines the global threat that worsening climate events pose, I believe it also indicates the global scale of cooperation needed to ameliorate the humanitarian, economic, and financial impact of these disasters on human populations.
In the 1970s, available records pegged the financial cost of climate disaster at a daily average of $49 million. Those costs have exploded recently, and as of the 2010s, the daily economic expense of weather-related damage was a mammoth $383 million per day. Worse, three out of the ten costliest weather events on record occurred recently, all in a single year, and together they account for 35% of total economic disaster loss from 1970 to 2019.
The cost of climate change isn’t only financial though. The top ten deadliest weather hazards between 1970 and 2019 also account for well over a million deaths, according to the WMO. Droughts caused the most damage during the period, causing 650,000 deaths, followed closely by storms which led to 577,232 deaths.
While some part of these events’ deadly aspect can be attributed to their force and wide-ranging impact, they are even deadlier for the multiplier effects they produce on affected populations. For many, climate-related disasters often spell the loss of livelihood, shelter, sustenance, security, and any semblance of normal life. In the event of such disasters, the most affected find their lives suddenly and violently thrown off track, sometimes permanently. Often, only those in countries with established and extensive welfare systems are able to return to a normal life.
In my opinion, one of the harshest outcomes of climate disaster is its effect on the ability to procure a livelihood and sustenance. Climate operates quite visibly and devastatingly on food systems, and these events are significant threat factors for global food security. Addressing this topic in a report on the impact of disasters and crises on agriculture and food security, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) notes that “the growing frequency and intensity of disasters, along with the systemic nature of risk, are jeopardizing our entire food system.”
As Qu Dongyu, Director-General of the FAO, notes, “we are living at a time that demands ambitious collective measures.” The world can only move the needle on climate-related goals and effectively tackle the growing menace of weather disaster with comprehensive and broad-based action from all sides.
Climate is a global problem, and in my opinion, it will take only global action to address this threat. Dongyu frames the task facing the world aptly when he says “the ability of governments, international organizations, civil society and the private sector to operate and cooperate in fragile and disaster-prone contexts is a defining feature for meeting global targets and achieving resilience and sustainability.”
The world must act collectively and decisively in unearthing, fine-tuning, implementing and scaling plans to cushion the effects of climate change. Trade, agriculture, and disaster-readiness are low-hanging fruits that can provide immediate results, as the World Bank asserts.
Ultimately, it is undeniable that climate disaster risk is a growing threat factor for the entire world, and mitigating this threat will require broad global cooperation to secure the lives and livelihood of at-risk populations.
The general view is that energy efficiency is good for the environment. After all, the less energy a device consumes, the better an outcome that provides for the environment.
Therefore, if devices consume less than they would have because of technological advancement, it seems logical to pursue and encourage those advancements that provide efficiency.
However, as I see it, the problem with this position is that while energy efficiency might help individual devices perform better and use less energy, that’s not necessarily good for the environment. If the goal is to eventually create a sustainable future that protects our natural environment, then energy efficiency does nothing for this in real terms.
Instead, energy efficiency only makes power easier to use and access since it is cheaper and more available, thereby increasing energy consumption in real terms. As a result, I argue in this article that while energy efficiency might provide nominal gains in energy usage, the eventual goal should be energy sustainability and sufficiency. And this should not merely be a shift to sustainable energy sources either, but a move towards less energy use overall, and I explain why here.
Take the example of LED lighting vs. incandescent lightbulbs. A single incandescent lightbulb consumes roughly 60 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity every 1,000 hours. Compared to this, an LED lightbulb uses 70% less energy, meaning a consumption rate of roughly 18 kWh per 1,000 hours.
Millions of devices, appliances, and other energy-consuming products operate on this same premise: comparing the device’s energy usage now versus what it could have been. Considering this, the world should consequently see a net reduction in energy use since millions and millions of everyday devices and industries now prioritize energy efficiency.
However, since energy efficiency became a big deal in the 2000s, the world has not seen a net reduction in usage rates. Instead, energy use has ballooned – global energy consumption has increased by 1% to 2% almost every year for the past half-century (per 2019 figures). The only exceptions are 1980 and 2009.
Putting this information in graphic terms, the World Atlas of Light Pollution reports that 83% of the world’s population (and 99% of Europe and the US) live under a night sky that is 10% brighter than normal. And estimations are that the world’s energy demand will only increase by as much as 37% by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency.
The basic answer is that energy resources are not infinite. On the contrary, they are limited, particularly in the case of fossil fuels, and will eventually run out.
But I’m sure this is no news. A significant part of the green energy drive is founded on the acceptance that the development of renewable energy sources is necessary to prevent (or at least prolong) the depletion of fossil fuels.
However, rampant energy use is still undesirable, even with limitless amounts of renewable sources to call on. I have written in the past about how the exploitation of resources for sustainable energy can be detrimental to the environment, society, and economies of the countries where these resources are sourced.
The experience in countries like Venezuela and the Congo, which are significant producers of cobalt – a primary resource in lithium-ion batteries, is a testament to the dangers of an unbridled pursuit for greater efficiency.
Perhaps rather than look to create more efficient electric vehicles, we should promote bicycles and the use of public buses. Also, maybe buildings should incorporate more natural lighting and ventilation rather than mega installations of HVACS and temperature control systems.