A brief history of sustainability across IT
How did we get here and where are we going?
You can find the roots of corporate sustainability in the environmental movement of the 1960s. The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), significant environmental legislation over the following decades, and pressure from independent organizations like Ceres and the Sierra Club in response to environmental disasters led many companies to get serious about addressing their environmental impact.
Regulation of water and air pollution spurred many of the companies you might think of as early giants of the tech industry to double down on their corporate environmental policies — IBM, Hewlett Packard, and others have environmental policies dating back to the 1970s. Many of these early initiatives focused on mitigating and reducing pollution tied to manufacturing.
In the late 1980s, as the tech industry we know and love today started to emerge, the United Nations launched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). At the same time, the scientific community began to caution about the risks of climate change and the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions causing them. In the decades to come, global leaders would create the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement in an attempt to curb GHG emissions and limit global warming to 2 °C — a widely recognized tipping point. In response, tech companies started to get wise to the role they play in addressing climate change, as both contributors to as much as 6% of global GHG emissions and as enablers of climate solutions. The strong financial influence of the tech industry and the embedded nature of IT in nearly all enterprises is estimated to have the potential to drive a 15% reduction in global GHGs by 2030.
To address their own emissions, many companies have set targets for reducing or completely offsetting their GHG emissions (“net zero”). Some have gone so far as to set goals for reaching net negative emissions. Others, like Amazon, are investing in climate tech — the start-ups and companies developing technology to address our climate crisis like new renewable energy tech, carbon capture, and more. Microsoft and IBM both offer tools and services through grants with non-profits, governmental organizations, and academic researchers to accelerate projects addressing environmental challenges. And finally, many companies are focused on driving sustainability through their research, products and clients — whether it’s hardware companies focusing on sustainable product design and manufacturing or creating software platforms to help all enterprises reach net zero.
These efforts are heading in the right direction — tech companies need to step up as corporate citizens in the fight against climate change. At its core though, becoming a truly sustainable enterprise means reducing our direct impact on the earth as much as possible — actively taking steps across operations to reduce our GHG emissions and minimize waste. For IT, and for someone like me who spends their days thinking about how CIO organizations can drive sustainability across an entire company and beyond, this isn’t always as glamorous as funding exciting new startups or negotiating global climate policy. It’s a lot more pragmatic — data, analytics, spreadsheets, business processes, and reporting. It means rolling up our sleeves and figuring out where the real opportunities to drive energy efficiency and waste reduction lie, and then testing out solutions and troubleshooting like crazy.
The scary (and just a tiny bit exciting) part of sustainable IT is that the industry is still largely winging it. Only 18% of companies report having a comprehensive sustainable IT strategy. Companies are in the thick of defining best practices for baselining and optimizing energy consumption tied to their data centers, IT infrastructure, devices, AI models, and applications. CIOs and their teams are starting to see the central role their organization plays in enabling the entire company to set and meet sustainability goals by providing data and analytics to optimize energy and reduce waste across all business operations. If you’re not already thinking about how your company’s IT processes can be more sustainable while also driving sustainability, I’d like to suggest that now is the time to start having those conversations with your business leaders. It’s an exciting, busy, and important time to work in this space. If you’re experimenting your way through your company’s sustainability journey, I hope you’ll join me here each month as I explore how IT can play a small but mighty role in helping save our planet.
Stacey Gifford, Ph.D. is CIO Sustainability Lead at IBM and is based in Connecticut. This article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
