Ben Goldhirsh, CEO, GOOD

By Ben Goldhirsh

Cloud computing is the new mantra for small businesses looking to go green.

That’s important because IT’s carbon footprint has been expanding. Between 2011 and 2020, carbon emissions for worldwide information communication technology (ICT) equipment and services are expected to double from 2 percent to 4 percent of total emissions, according to market research firm Verdantix.

Becoming a green business means more than just eliminating paper. It is about eliminating waste and reducing energy consumption. One easy step towards “going green” and significantly decreasing your carbon footprint is to eliminate or reduce energy-consuming on-premises equipment and move your IT to the cloud.

Cloud computing, storing and accessing data and software from remote servers, is changing the way the world does business. The cloud can be accessed from anywhere there’s an Internet connection. The cloud allows increasing amounts of Big Data generated from mobile devices and social channels to be captured, stored and continuously updated in one, central location. This dramatically reduces a business’ power consumption and in turn, energy bills.

When small companies run their own servers, idle time is a considerable problem. Small companies never use 100 percent of their computing power 100 percent of the time – it’s not even close. Most of the time, the server is idle, using power while not doing anything productive. Cloud technology means small companies use only the technology and energy they actually need. In other words, Cloud computing allows small, green businesses to work more efficiently and become even more eco-friendly.

In the U.S. alone, cloud computing will reduce carbon emissions by almost 86 million metric tons per year by 2020, generating a potential energy savings of more than $12 billion/year. Businesses, both established and start-ups, large or small can all go cloud, and go green, at the same time.

For example, large companies moving to the cloud can reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by 30 percent. Small businesses save even more energy than their larger counterparts – up to 90 percent.

To help spur wide adoption of these technologies, cloud providers, and more specifically managed service providers, are uniquely positioned to assist small businesses in devising and implementing a Green IT strategy. Guidance from local technology providers goes a long way to help shape sustainable, socially responsible – and profitable – green businesses.

Gartner predicts the worldwide cloud computing market will grow to more than $14 billion in 2013. This growth indicates the small businesses that make up 65 percent of the total business community are actively pursuing cloud computing as a way to keep costs down, improve processes and transition to a mobile workforce.

In addition to the green benefits of cloud computing, such services are also lowering the barrier to entry into business for many SMBs, such as eliminating the need to establishing expensive in-house IT capabilities. Also, cloud computing levels the playing field and enables start-ups and SMBs to act like, and operate like, organizations of much greater size and scope.

With SMBs serving as the growth engine for many countries, cloud computing can spur the growth of local industries and local economies in environmentally friendly ways.

Technorati Tags: cloud, cloud computing, green cloud, ibm cloud, IBM Smarter Planet, smarter systems, SMB, start-ups

Wayne Balta, Vice President, Environmental Affairs and Product Safety, IBM

By Wayne Balta

IBM yesterday was recognized for its supply chain leadership by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  The company was presented with a 2013 Climate Leadership Award in Washington, D.C. by the EPA, the Association of Climate Change Officers, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, and The Climate Registry.

The award cited IBM for our ambitious emissions reduction goals, and for being at the leading edge of setting requirements for suppliers to measure, disclose and reduce their operational greenhouse gas emissions..

IBM takes environmental leadership very seriously, because it’s essential to building a smarter planet.  In the area of supply chain, the company is committed to doing business with environmentally responsible suppliers.

We run one of the largest, most complex supply chains in the world, with more than 23,000 first-tier suppliers in 90 countries. In 2010, IBM introduced new management system requirements to advance sustainability across our global network of suppliers.

(From left:) Mike Ray, IBM VP, Integrated Supply Chain; Beth Craig, Director, EPA Climate Protection Partnership Division; and Lou Ferretti, IBM Integrated Supply Chain Project Executive

Our sustainability initiatives go well beyond its corporate practices. Most recently, IBM is collaborating with the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, together with the World Environment Center, on a program that offers graduate students opportunities to work with leading global companies while pursuing their studies in sustainability development. The program, called the Erb/WEC Fellowships, is a part of IBM’s efforts to develop next-generation skills and real-life learning opportunities for the 21st century workforce.

Technorati Tags: Energy & Environment, Leadership, smarter_planet, supply chain

Typhoon Sanba. Credit: NASA

Last September, when Typhoon Sanba smashed into the Korean peninsula, it packed winds so strong that they sent rocks flying through the air like missiles and caused massive power outages.

“Hwangsa” storms, carrying dense clouds of yellow dust from China’s Gobi Desert that are sometimes loaded with heavy metals and carcinogens, sweep across the peninsula from West to East.

Menaced by such destructive weather phenomena, South Korea is upgrading its national weather information system with the goal of understanding weather patterns better and predicting better the location and ferocity of weather events. The upgrade being installed by the Korean Meteorological Administration increases the agency’s data storage capacity by nearly 1000% to 9.3 petabytes, making it Korea’s most capable storage system. IBM provides the storage hardware and software.

The KMA project dramatically illustrates today’s big data phenomenon and its impact on weather forecasting. Thanks to the rapid spread of sensors and satellites, and to the increase in computer number-crunching speeds, it’s possible to forecast weather changes more accurately and with improved detail–potentially saving thousands of lives and safeguarding property.

Increasing evidence of climate change worldwide is prompting governments and scientists to take action to protect people and property from its effects. But, to take effective action, they need to know understand a lot more about the weather–everything from what’s going to happen tomorrow to what’s coming next year. For instance, leaders of the city of Hoboken, N.J., in the United States, which flooded badly last fall during Hurricane Sandy, are considering building a wall around the city to keep the tidal Hudson River at bay, but, the problem is, if they don’t build high enough the wall could end up turning Hoboken into a giant bathtub rather than keeping rising waters out.

IBM Research scientists are taking the lead in bringing the most sophisticated data analytics to bear on weather forecasting. Their long-term weather analysis project, called Deep Thunder, combines data with sophisticated mathematical algorithms and  computing power.

The scientists established at test bed in the New York City metropolitan area, where they set up a three-dimensional grid of thousands of blocks. That makes it possible for them to run calculations that produce very precise weather forecasts for a particular locale. Using this capability, the team was able to predict with remarkable accuracy the snowfall totals in New York City during the mammoth snow storm that blanked the northeastern United States in February–and also to predict accurately when the snowfall would start and stop.

The IBM Research team is putting their algorithms to work on behalf of cities around the world. For instance, Rio de Janeiro, because of its climate and terrain, has recurring flooding and landslide problems in many hilly neighborhoods. The researchers used data describing the physics of the atmosphere to create a mathematical model of how storms are likely to unfold in Rio. With it, they can predict up to 40 hours ahead of time how much rain will fall in a particular location—with 90% accuracy.

In recent months, the Deep Thunder team, lead by Lloyd Treinish, has developed new techniques for ingesting many more measurements from weather sensors. The team is also extending its technology to new applications, including agriculture and wind farming.

For detailed and super-accurate weather information to have maximum impact, it has to be accessible by a large number of people. That’s why we have created iPad and cloud applications that deliver the power of Deep Thunder to people’s hands wherever they may be. Hopefully, by the time Rio hosts the summer Olympics in 2016, practically everybody who attends will be able to get their hands on Deep Thunder data so they know exactly what to expect when they venture out to the games.

Technorati Tags: Deep Thunder, IBM, Korean Meteorological Administration, weather

Chris Steinkamp, Executive Director, Protect Our Winters

By Chris Steinkamp

Last year was the warmest in recorded history. But now we’re experiencing a sudden shift from the unseasonably warm temperatures of 2012 to below-freezing temperatures as we begin the new year.

We all know that what’s happening out the window is weather, not climate, but these radical shifts in temperature are likely to be more frequent due to global climate change – a long-term trend caused by increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. And we’re already seeing how nature is responding.

President Barack Obama pledged in his inaugural address last week to respond to the threat of climate change. Looking at the Big Data already generated from scientific researchers from around the world, a level of insight is needed to identify and analyze extreme weather patterns such as raging fires, crippling drought, powerful storms and dramatic shifts in temperature – as well as to outline the steps needed to reduce our carbon footprint.

For instance, last July saw the most dramatic ice melt across Greenland in over a century, affecting 97 percent of the giant island’s surface. In September, the Arctic sea ice pack shrunk to its lowest level in millennia. Polar climatologists now project the complete disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice within five to seven years.

A recent report published by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the snow sports non-profit, Protect Our Winters, said that without intervention, winter temperatures are projected to warm an additional 4 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, with subsequent decreases in snow cover area. Snow depths could decline in the western U.S. by 25 to 100 percent. In addition, the length of the snow season in the northeast could be cut in half.

The United Nations Environment Programme has identified the ski industry, which needs cold weather and snow to thrive, as one of the most vulnerable to climate change worldwide. Stunning, snow-capped and especially glitzy Alpine ski resorts (Austria’s Kitzbuhel, Germany’s Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Italy’s Cortina, the latter two being former Olympic sites) are losing their snow. Winters in mountainous regions all across Europe and North America are getting warmer and shorter. The estimated $12.2 billion U.S. ski and snowmobile winter sports industry has already felt the direct impact of decreased winter snowpack and rising average winter temperatures. It’s said that both have cost the resort industry $1.07 billion in aggregated revenue over the last decade.

Climate change will spell more trouble for all small businesses that depend on winter weather and activities for their livelihoods. From snowmobiling, snowboarding, and skiing to ice fishing and snowshoeing, a wide range business sectors depend on winter-related tourism, including restaurants, lodging, gas stations and grocery stores, to name a few.

The Protect Our Winters/NRDC report states that winter tourism supports 211,900 jobs in the U.S., earning a total of $7.0 billion in wages and generating over $1.7 billion in federal taxes.

Of course, climate change is impacting far more than the winter tourism industry. We’re also seeing the impact of climate change in the agricultural industry where crop yields are negatively impacted. Think of your favorite fruits – Florida oranges, Texas grapefruit, California strawberries. Most fruit trees have to chill. Literally. They need winter temperatures to drop to within a certain range — usually just above freezing — and remain there for a set period of time. This allows the buds to go into dormancy and tolerate harsh winter weather, then reset themselves for the fruit production cycle to start again once spring comes around.

If trees don’t get sufficient chilling, they don’t bear fruit. Fruit-growing regions around the world such as Sacramento Valley in California, the Southeastern United States,Chile’s Valle Central,YunnanProvince inChina, South and Northern Africa, as well as South and Southwestern Australia, are likely to experience severe reductions in available winter chill and potentially threatening harvests.

Serious efforts and technologies to analyze extreme weather patterns caused by carbon pollution can help to offset the anticipated warming trends, lessening the impact on these industries. It’s imperative that we continue to work towards minimizing the amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere. However, in addition to new technologies, analytics, and strong climate legislation, climate adaptation is also a main area of discussion since the warming has begun and won’t likely be stopped entirely.

As such, the ski industry will need to explore alternate areas of revenue, while growers and plant scientists will need to adapt their crops to changing conditions for lower chilling requirements, all while generating insight to better anticipate and understand temperature responses and changing growth seasons.

To be sure, climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the now.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, climate change, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, predictive analytics, smarter analytics, Smarter Planet

Nearly four years into the Smarter Planet journey, IBMers have undertaken more than 2,000 engagements with governments and businesses aimed helping them use cutting-edge technologies to make their systems for getting things done work better. These encounters are all over the map, geographically and figuratively. But important lessons are being learned. And, in particular, one interesting pattern is emerging. For organizations of all types, good outcomes depend on addressing the yin and yang of building a smarter planet: a combination of improvisation and preparedness–or long term planning.

Improvisation: In the realm of smarter planet problems and solutions, there’s so much variability that no single blueprint will fit every overtly similar situation. Organizations have to be flexible and creative to get stuff done. They can’t let the need for a master plan or budget-tightening pressures paralyze them.

Preparedness: While creative fixes can help city leaders manage their systems for the short-term, the longer-term vitality of cities, countries and organizations depends on leaders adopting a mission and a strategy for achieving it. But even that’s not enough. They have to anticipate the challenges to come–everything from next year’s big storm to the impacts of climate change to the next big financial shock–and build resilient systems capable of withstanding them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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A good example of improvisation comes from Nairobi, Kenya. Throughout the world, many cities are starting to roll out vast networks of video cameras trained on highways and intersections. The  goal is to use video images to provide up-to-the-minute reads on traffic conditions–so local authorities can manage traffic better by changing traffic signals, rerouting, or sending police or public works employees to address problems as they emerge. In Nairobi, rather than wait for an extensive deployment of its own video cameras, the city made a deal with a local Internet service provider that had installed some cameras so it could show live traffic situations on its Web portal. They have plans to buy and deploy their own network of cameras. “But, in the mean time, they’re working in partnership with a private company. They’re making do,” says Wendy Lung, the director of corporate strategy for IBM Venture Capital Group.

Lung was one of six IBM executives who recently spent three weeks in Nairobi working with local authorities to help them come up with a plan for modernizing the transportation system. They’re participating in IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge as members of the Executive Service Corps, a free, volunteer effort modeled on the US Peace Corps that’s aimed at providing expert advice to cities around the world while helping IBM train leaders capable of dealing with the cultural, political and financial challenges inherent in doing business globally.

The Nairobi leaders didn’t see their arrangement with the ISP as the long term solution, but it’s a practically approach to problem solving that works and helps them get stuff done. And it raises the question: What other creative approaches could the Kenyan government leaders take to accomplish their goals? Lung and her colleagues had creative problem solving in mind when they made recommendations at the end of their engagement in Nairobi. One of them: That a wide variety of government agencies in Kenya–and, indeed, across East Africa–would to well to share a single cloud computing set up for handling many of their transportation-management needs. This would make it easier to share information between government agencies, and they’d save money, as well.

But while Nairobi’s short-term approach to getting access to traffic video was smart, inspired improvisation only goes so far. Consider last year’s Japanese earthquake and tsunami. It’s impossible to respond adequately to a disaster of that magnitude. So it’s vital to take the long view, anticipate potential problems, and build systems capable of avoiding them or diminishing their impact.

This approach depends to a great extent on honesty and transparency. Organizations and societies have to be willing to confront their vulnerabilities and make the policy changes and financial investments necessary for dealing with them.

Colin Harrison, an IBM Smarter Cities technical strategist, has traveled to Japan repeatedly since the quake to help out with recovery and preparedness. A surprise discovery in the aftermath, he believes, teaches us a great deal about the importance of facing our societal demons head on.

The Japanese coastline has cliffs some 60-80 meters high that are pierced by rivers draining the inland plain. These rivers have carved narrow valleys ending in bays. There are many small fishing villages along this coast. When the tsunami struck, the wall of water entered the bays and the steep valley walls acted like funnels—so the flood surged high and devastated the fishing villages. In the aftermath of the quake,  people discovered long-forgotten, centuries-old stone markers in these valleys that are inscribed with warnings not to build houses below the level of the markers. Japanese ancestors knew of the risks of major tsunamis, but over the centuries their descendants forgot or decided to take the risk.

Harrison’s takeaway: “Prepare for the next disasters by making societies more resilient—because disasters will surely come.” One of the core principles for achieving resilience is to create diversity within systems. That way, if one element fails, others can succeed and help balance out the losses. The Internet is designed based on that principle. In the district east of the Japanese city of Sendai, which was devastated by the quake and tsunami, the people living there had become critically dependent on one form of economic activity, farming. When the disaster struck, their entire economy was destroyed, since the salt water has made their land infertile for decades to come. IBM is now working with universities and farmers to establish new approaches to agriculture, such as hydroponic farming.

Resilience has become a major theme for IBM researchers in Japan, the United States, Australia and elsewhere. Much of this work is being done in collaboration with governments and universities. But there’s a private sector angle, as well. A group of major corporations has become so concerned about the resilience of societies and industrial infrastructure that they have formed a loose confederation, called the Resilience Action Initiative, to proactively address issues arising over the next decades due to the combination of population growth and resource constraints.

It’s early days for the initiative, but IBM has begun gathering information and experiences that can help build a new methodology for creating resilience. In fact, it treats some of the Executive Services Corps engagements as”scouting parties” to help shape their thinking, says Harrison.

Which takes us back to the yin and yang of the smarter planet. In a time with so many economic, political and social conflicts in play, the push and pull between improvisation and preparedness is shaping up to be one of the important dialectical relationships of the 21st Century–and one that won’t be easy to work out.

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Read a white paper about IBM’s commitment to Africa.

Here’s a white paper about IBM’s Transportation Maturity Model.

Here’s a study by UN-HABITAT about Nairobi’s economic prospects.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Japan, Kenya, Nairobi, Resilience Action Initiative

Cahill

Across North America, drought-stricken farmers are facing historically small harvests, raising concerns about global shortages and increasing food prices. This summer’s drought should be a strong reminder that we have to manage our water resources more carefully.

In many countries, the competition for water between the countryside and cities is intensifying.  Farmers  face an uphill battle in the competition for water since industry can afford to pay much more than they can, according to the Earth Policy Institute.

This battle over water is likely to intensify. As the world’s levels of CO2 emissions continue to rise, the frequency of extreme weather phenomena such as heat waves is expected to intensify. Heat waves are expected to further strain the world’s water resources, especially in areas where water demand is increasing and water supplies are shrinking. The challenge worldwide is to meet today’s water needs while putting in place innovative strategies to address future requirements.

One of the best ways to promote sustainability is to make consumers aware of the true cost of water.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What we pay to the water company each month only reflects the price to bring clean water to our taps. It does not reflect the value of the resource in each of its various uses. Water management, resource expansion, environmental protection and infrastructure maintenance are expensive, and much of the cost is redistributed through state and federal taxes, as well as local and regional bond measures, according to the American Water Resources Association.

Transparency about the real cost of water should be a fundamental principle, irrespective of the source of funds that underwrite the supply.

Sullivan

For example, as a nation, we must begin to treat water as we would any other scarce resource and learn to live within our means. This requires efficiency and planning for sustainable use in the face of increasing demands for water, particularly in agriculture, industry and power production. Concern over the intensive use of groundwater, deterioration of surface waters, and various state and federal nutrient and water management regulations, are making us reexamine the efficiency of water and nutrient management strategies.

A study by University of California at Davis scientists shows that plants only use half the nitrogen fertilizer that farmers apply. The other half travels down through the soil, eventually making its way into local drinking water supplies where nitrate contamination can make the water unfit for drinking.

It’s a serious problem that’s getting worse.

Research shows that coupling the use of soil moisture measurement technology with irrigation controls can reduce water application and nutrient runoff by 50 percent – and those efficiencies also mean reduced energy use because less water is pumped overall.

Furthermore, increasing drought and aridity around the world, linked to climate change and land degradation, are becoming a major threat to food security and poverty reduction efforts, according to the United Nations.  Since 1950, 1.9 billion hectares (4.7 billion acres) of land around the world has become degraded, a problem that has reduced harvests, contributed to changing rainfall patterns and increased the vulnerability of millions of people. Each year, on average, another 12 million hectares (30 million acres) of land a year is lost to the problem.

Applying analytic insight can assess drought conditions, communicate threats and trigger actions in a systematic and efficient manner as drought conditions intensify. Although progress is being made, much more work is required to develop effective systems across the globe and to provide information at a scale that is meaningful for drought planning at the local level by water managers and other decision makers.

Extreme events – such as the extreme floods and droughts around the world in recent years – often provide stimulus for action. They provide the opening for change to take place.

Technorati Tags: IBM, UgMo

Recently, IBM detailed two new computers that will help change the way the world, literally, works.

The first, Sequoia, is the world’s most powerful supercomputer, capable of calculating in one hour what would otherwise take 6.7 billion people using hand calculators 320 years to complete if they worked non-stop. It is installed at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The second is the first commercial machine, cooled by hot water, built for the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Germany. It will be used by scientists across Europe to drive a wide range of research ­­− from simulating the blood flow behind an artificial heart valve, to devising quieter aeroplanes.

What’s impressive about these machines is not just their massive processing power alone, but  they are remarkably energy efficient, too.

For example, while Sequoia is more than one and a half times faster than its nearest competitor, it is almost two and a half times more energy efficient. Meanwhile, the water-cooled Leibniz machine consumes 40 percent less energy than traditional air-cooled versions. Since water is able to remove heat 4,000 times more efficiently than air, hot water is an innovative means to more efficiently cool computers than the conventional approach based on chilled water. It also allows energy to be captured from the system and reused to heat the buildings during winter. These advances afford potential energy savings of around 1 million euros per year.

Not all large-scale supercomputers need to be quite as powerful as these two. However, across Europe hundreds of machines are used to run essential daily tasks in the numerous data centers that power many of the government and commercial systems we take for granted.

As a result, information and communication technology already consumes 8 to 10 percent of the EU’s electricity and by 2020 that figure may double. Data centers in Western Europe alone consume up to 100 billion kilowatt hours a year. That’s more or less the total electricity consumption of the Netherlands.

That’s why the European Commission has created a Code of Conduct to encourage all data center operators to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner. The guidance provides a set of best practices.

In May 2012, the European Union Code of Conduct for Datacenters pronounced IBM the Corporate Participant winner for 2012. Dr. Paolo Bertoldi, Principal Administrator at the European Commission Joint Research Centre in charge of research activities on energy efficiency policy, praised IBM for its systematic approach and for achieving results in a large number of data centers.

It’s the latest in a line of environmental awards since IBM announced its first corporate policy on environmental affairs in 1971.

What does IBM do to maintain its energy efficiency leadership in its data centers? Older hardware equipment is continually upgraded while industry-leading server consolidation and virtualization techniques are also employed to help ensure computers run at optimal capacity.

Analytics plays a crucial role too: Mobile Measurement Technology (MMT), developed by IBM Research, instruments the data centers with thousands of sensors to record and analyze temperatures and air flow to detect hot and cold spots. By providing energy flow insight in real-time, MMT provides the intelligence to enable more efficient cooling.

In an increasingly instrumented and interconnected world, the amount of data the world is producing is growing exponentially; we reckon there will be around 44 times as much data and content over the next decade as there is today.

Gaining insight and intelligence from all that data will largely be the job of the world’s supercomputers and that will take a great deal of processing and energy power. We’ll continue to work tirelessly on increasing the first while systematically reducing the second.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Sequoia

Market forces are cooperating. Prices for solar panels are plummeting. But there remain some major impediments to solar adoption. All things considered, it’s still more expensive than traditional energy sources.

That’s where data analytics comes in. As part of the SMART NY, IBM is working with CUNY Ventures, a for-profit offshoot of the City University of New York, to create a system for gathering and analyzing information about the entire solar ecosystem within the city. The goal is to bring down the cost of installing solar.  “We’re looking to make solar competitive with other sources. We need to mainstream this technology to make it easy to adopt,” says Tria Case, CUNY’s director of sustainability and coordinator of  SMART NY.

New York became a player in solar energy when it launched its first long-term solar strategy in 2007. Since then, the amount of photovoltaic capacity installed has increased by a factor of 8, to 8.8 megawatts. That’s still a relatively small slice of the city’s energy supply, but it’s a start. Solar advocates believe the city could amass up to 70 megawatts of solar capacity in the next five years.

But for that to happen, the city has to help bring down the so-called “soft” costs. Those include financing, permitting and the incentives qualification process.

To achieve that goal, the city is using IBM’s Intelligent Operations Center software to monitor and analyze solar production and capacity and display the data on a dashboard of key indicators. The information will be drawn from the NYC Solar Portal, which is an inter-agency permitting and tracking tool; data collection systems in the city’s five solar empowerment zones, and the interactive NYC Solar Map, which businesses and citizens can use to size up their solar production potential and what it would cost to go solar. Case expects to be able to use insights gleaned from the dashboard to help streamline the permitting process and remove other barriers to adoption.

There’s an important role for citizens in this project–both as consumers of solar energy and as potential generators of energy not only for their own use but for selling back into the electrical grid. They can also provide feedback via the NYC Solar Map Web site.

The plan is to refine the monitoring and analytics system over the next year and then extend it to all of New York. Ultimately, CUNY Ventures and IBM hope to be able to package the technology and sell it as a service to other municipalities around the United States.

Now, that would be a sustainable approach to sustainability.

Technorati Tags: CUNY Ventures, IBM, NYC Solar City America, Tria Case

People complain that my generation’s “addiction” to technology will lead us down the path of unsustainability.  I think they are wrong.  While it is true that my generation, Gen Y (those born after 1980) is the quickest demographic to adopt new computing trends, the advances that we are adopting—mobile, cloud, big data—are intrinsically greener.  So, as white-collar Baby Boomers step away from their life in front of a computer, and the new wave of Gen Y workers step forward to take their place, the computing landscape will move to a more energy efficient and sustainable future.

Consider that a decade ago, Baby Boomer households joined the Internet Revolution by purchasing hulking desktop computers. But over the past decade we have seen a shift with laptops overtaking the personal computing market. And that means less energy use—a typical laptop uses 45 watts  while your typical energy guzzling desktop computer uses a whopping 100 to 300 watts of electricity.

Who among my generation wants a desktop?  Very few, if any at all.  As my friends moved out of their family home bound for college or transitioned to a new city for their first job, the laptop perfectly complemented their geographically shifting lifestyles.  That’s not going to change; my generation today lives even more of a life on the move, spending less time at home than ever.  With this, smartphones and tablet computers, which use even less energy, are rapidly becoming the new gadgets that power our lives.

And it doesn’t stop there.  Gen Y also loves cloud computing, an environmentally friendly solution that fully supports our life in motion.  We grew up in a world of free, web-based email and have fully embraced the smartphone revolution.  Now accustomed to the ability to access data “on the fly,” Gen Y houses contact lists, banking tools, homework files, and other personal information in the cloud.

Gen Y doesn’t bother to purchase traditional newspapers or to tune in to the nightly news broadcast.  Instead, it uses social media and Internet news sites that can simultaneously deliver to millions through the cloud. And most importantly for the planet, cloud computing enables servers to fully utilize computing capacity, allowing data centers to save energy by requiring less power and cooling supports.

Finally, we are not alone in our pursuit of these continuous improvements in energy efficient technologies.  Our university IT departments are quick to follow where we are going.  At my school, the University of Michigan, email is moving from university servers to the cloud.  The university also recently released a new storage service, making it easier for students to share and retrieve files seamlessly through the cloud.  In this way, universities reinforce IT trends by first adapting to the computing habits of their students, then mass deploying current computing products to that next generation of workers.

Embrace my generation’s addiction to technology.  The Information Technology industry continues to innovate towards energy efficiency; with Gen Y at the helm of the world economy, the IT industry can rest assured that these green innovations will be adopted with a hungry enthusiasm.

Lawrence Han (Class of 2014) worked as a systems integration consultant prior to graduate school

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, ERB, IBM, internet, mobile devices, national medal of technology, University of Michigan

Corporate sustainability strategies are common practice in today’s corporate America, going far beyond a company’s environmental footprint, to becoming a central part of company strategy.  Sustainability challenges companies to think about themselves as part of an integrated social and natural network. This type of “systems thinking” drives the emergence of new ways of business thinking.

Systems thinking includes an array of techniques that consider process, product or strategy within a larger context. Two of the more familiar concepts linked with systems thinking are industrial ecology and life cycle analysis.  But a third concept — ecosystem services – is the next big challenge, requiring that companies consider how nature’s interacting pathways lead directly back to business success.

Businesses rely on key ecosystem services like air purification, water provision, or storm surge protection, and these services are not as abundant as they once were. For example, the USDA has estimated that honey bees provide over $15 billion in value to US companies and consumers (for free). However, a mysterious decline in US honey bees (Colony Collapse Disorder) has caused business to consider the costs and benefits of the pollination service they provide.

But, while the lack of ecosystem services can be a liability, their presence can be the source of unrecognized business opportunities. In fact, according to the World Businesses Council for Sustainable Development, global business opportunity in natural resources, largely from ecosystem services, is estimated to be as much as $2-6 trillion USD by 2050.

To fully evaluate ecosystem services risks and opportunities and include them in financial bookkeeping, corporations must think with a new “environmental brain,.” The ecosystems perspective considers global (e.g. the service of climate regulation) and local (e.g. fresh water provision in the local watershed) scales; values immediate expenditure with long-term paybacks and establishes novel partnerships. It thinks in non-linear terms, looking for feedback loops, tipping points, synergies and other complex relationships.

New methodologies that help businesses manage ecosystem risks and opportunities have been developed (such as the World Resources Institute’s Corporate Ecosystem Services Review, which as of March had been used by 300 companies).  There is a real need  for additional tools and complex information technology platforms to take us to this next level.  Integrated software could help collect and synthesize the massive volumes of disparate information necessary to think systemically about corporate activities and their place within the broader environment of ecosystem services.

The “environmental brain” has exciting potential to create unexpected payoff. A systems perspective may reveal how seemingly unconnected business units can benefit one another. Insight gained from managing resources shared with diverse stakeholders can foster beneficial public-private or industry relations (they say you cannot pick your family…you cannot pick who you share your ecosystem with either…). New skills synthesizing regulatory, social and financial data can be used to advance processes or products .Systems thinking impacts, not just sustainability performance, but also business thinking, spurring innovation that benefits the bottom line, as well as the planet.

Berry Kennedy is a MBA/MS Natural Resources student (Class of 2014). Prior to school, she worked as Development Coordinator for the Mexican Fund for the Conservation of Nature, Latin America’s largest national environmental fund.

Technorati Tags: IBM, University of Michigan