Digitalisation can help biggest industrial companies reduce carbon footprint, GSMA says
Author: Alvin R Cabral
Mobile and digital technology can help cut about 40 per cent of the required carbon dioxide emissions within the industrial world's top emitters in the next 10 years, London-based industry body GSMA has said. If deployed at scale, digitalisation, considered a key enabler of the decarbonisation transition, can help the manufacturing, power and energy, transport, and building sectors to reduce their carbon footprint, GSMA said in its Mobile Net Zero report for 2023. The sectors collectively account for about 80 per cent of global emissions. “For any country or company to get to net zero by 2050, reductions of 50 per cent will be required in each successive decade leading up to that point,” the report said. The GSMA is also pushing for a circular economy within the mobile device sector which relies on the supply of finite resources, causing one of its biggest environmental impacts.Samsung Electronics and Apple, the world's two biggest mobile phone manufacturers, have both committed to introduce measures that will support measures to meet carbon-reduction goals by 2030. Meanwhile, more telecom operators are tapping into renewable sources of energy to lower their overall emissions. Globally, 24 per cent of the electricity used by operators in 2022 was generated from renewable sources, up from 18 per cent in 2021 and 14 per cent in 2020, the GSMA said.