Digital services can help cut global emissions by 15-30 per cent, Atos CEO claims
The CEO of Atos has claimed digital services can help cut global carbon emissions by as much as 30 per cent as he introduced the French IT services giant's ‘A to Zero' offering.
Atos last year announced its goal of becoming net zero by 2035, a timetable it brought forward to 2028 in February.
At a press conference last week, Atos CEO Elie Girard billed the introduction of its new ‘end-to-end' decarbonisation portfolio as the latest step in its mission to become the global leader in decarbonised and secure digital services.
To support the new offering, Atos has introduced two new platforms - including its Carbon Dashboard - and also intends to increase the headcount at nine ‘Net Zero Transformation' centres of excellence - seven of which are new - from 150 to 500 by the end of 2022.
"Digital technology is an enabler for businesses to reduce carbon emissions. Digital services alone could directly enable from 15 and 30 per cent reduction in emissions needed by 2030," he said.
"We want to ensure all our clients and partners adopt digital technology that significantly reduces their carbon emissions so that they can reach net zero as fast as possible. Digital decarbonisation improves efficiency, reduces cost and drives innovation to achieve success. We believe climate action also makes commercial success."
Using technology to fight climate change
Although it's estimated that digital and ICT consumes about four per cent of carbon emissions, Jason Warren, VP head of Net Zero Transformation portfolio at Atos, claimed technology can be a net contributor in the fight against greenhouse gases by helping industries including energy, manufacturing, buildings and transport cut emissions.
Atos is cutting its clients' emissions through a variety of technologies, including HPC and IoT, as well as through collaboration technologies designed to reduce travel, he said, adding that Atos will sometimes pay a financial penalty if it does not meet targets set out in its ‘decarbonisation level agreements'.
The €11bn-revenue IT services giant also has a range of industry-specific solutions at its disposal, Warren added. This includes the digital twin solutions it typically uses to help manufacturing and pharma firms create virtual representations of physical assets, and ‘connected vessels', where IoT, compute and analytics are used to help ships become more fuel efficient.
"But that's not the full story for emission reduction progress," he said.
"You need to wrap it with the right policies, the frameworks, the commitments, and complement those with the right climate knowledge and ability to integrate all those technologies. And that's exactly what Atos has done."
Atos gave several examples of how it has helped clients decarbonise, including enabling renewable sources to be added to the redispatch platform of German transmission grid operator TransnetBW, increasing employee engagement in sustainability for DEFRA, and reducing the carbon footprint of pwc's services.
It also provided an end-to-end tech solution for drinks company innocent's first carbon-neutral factory in Rotterdam, Warren said.
"We are helping Innocent monitor and adjust the factory's energy consumption to support its decarbonisation objectives. Innocent aims to reduce the number of road miles travelled by 25 per cent and is cutting its carbon footprint by at least 10 per cent. The factory will create over 190 jobs and produce over 400 million bottles of chilled juice a year, so it's benefiting the business, the consumers, the staff - and climate change," he said.
Asked in the Q&A to name a single technology that would have the biggest impact on reducing emissions, Warren picked infrastructure modernisation.
"If you can modernise infrastructure and reduce the actual footprint of the infrastructure, and can take that infrastructure to public cloud, you can actually remove datacentres from the equation," he said.