When it comes to IT sustainability, the present economic uncertainty and political swings from diametrically opposite policies regarding climate change present a significant challenge to IT leaders. They require a technology roadmap to navigate these turbulent times robust enough to adapt to economic and political volatility.
Sujata Kukreja, general counsel and chief compliance officer at network management platform Expereo, urges tech leaders to manage sustainability with innovation and take into consideration the running costs of inefficient datacentres. “We have to invest money and we are very conscious of datacentre energy consumption,” she says.
Expereo therefore continues to prioritise emissions reduction, even if it’s costly. The procurement team increasingly seeks renewables-based arrangements. It’s about having a longer-term focus, especially with artificial intelligence (AI) tools coming in, says Kukreja. “But our investors are not going to continue if we’re not a business with purpose.”
Another company that expects to continue to focus on emissions reduction and science-based targets despite economic pressures worsening in the past year is Crown Worldwide. Chris Davis-Pipe, chief information officer at the global logistics firm, commands a 70-strong enterprise IT team with 3,000 staff across business units in some 50 countries.
“We’re working to get more visibility of the carbon we’re using and how to turn things off when we don’t want to use them,” says Davis-Pipe. “We stick solar on warehouses, we’re looking at using more renewable electricity, then we’re also moving from our own datacentres to more cloud-based services.”
Customers increasingly demand information on emissions reduction, including a plan with science-based goals and demonstrable progress. Crown’s carbon-accounting platform has been calculating its carbon footprint, with 66% of estimated emissions accounted for by the end of 2023. It doesn’t plan to roll back the strategy, but it is buying more software and services off the shelf. In the past, it would have built its own. In-house IT skills have refocused on integration and data analytics, he says.
Crown has also given countries and branches more leeway to improve IT environments locally – for instance, to achieve agility or efficiency within a governance framework. “We have core systems – main service delivery and financial systems – globally, but we’re much more open now for people to solve local issues locally,” Davis-Pipe explains.
Automation and AI – beyond Copilot content in marketing – are also areas where the company is alert to future use cases that support the business and its net-zero goals, he says.
Many firms may be in a similar position.
Doubling down on demand
Sarwar Khan, sustainability director at BT Group, reports that the company – and many of its partners and customers – are doubling down on net zero despite various pressures.
“I sit in the business arm, with support for SMB [small and mid-sized business] customers, public sector, wholesale including channel partners. And the pressure to reduce [environmental] impact is not going away,” Khan confirms. “It’s a key priority.”
While smaller businesses have “serious concerns” in terms of how they’re going to be sustainable and comply with net zero by 2050, they’re not backing off despite increasingly realising it’s an enormous task. Meanwhile, more specific key performance indicators (KPIs) on carbon, often revised quarterly, are appearing in the public sector.
The pressure to reduce [environmental] impact is not going away. It’s a key priority Sarwar Khan, BT Group
“SMBs are looking to big organisations, like us, to lead and support them,” says Khan. “In corporates, too, many are probably in that disillusionment phase, realising that they have to figure out how to operationalise it.”
BT this year brought forward its annually reviewed net-zero target for the business to 2031, and for the customer and supply chain to 2041 – from 2050. How?
“First, we looked at how we accelerate our plan on EV [electric vehicle] transition, as one of the largest fleet operators in the UK. Second, we looked closely at what we could reduce across our supply chain.”
About 70% of BT emissions are Scope 3, so supply chain efficiencies are crucial. Tier 1 contracts are coming in for specific attention, he adds, and must have a science-based net-zero target against which they disclose performance.
“If you don’t move the dial in that [Scope 3] space, getting to target is very difficult,” says Khan.
BT is doing more advocacy – including alongside competitors – as well as looking at the make-up of its renewables certificates and power purchase agreements. Multiple innovations and efficiencies are crucial as datacentre power demand rises, Khan points out.
Jon Healy, chief operating officer (COO) at datacentre solutions provider Keysource, reiterates that customers are shifting their net-zero strategies, including increasingly pushing suppliers to do more and reveal more rather than pulling back. Previously, some net-zero plans weren’t viable.
“In our world, they’re not going to get more customers if they’re not addressing their own emissions. Of course, what’s difficult is to get there despite the pressures, including speed to market, constrained supply chains and demand for compute,” Healy maintains.
“This has an impact right back to the drawing board, to strategic decision-making about where an organisation goes and which projects are fundamental.”
Consequent designs have to underlie and underpin sustainability and carbon intensity, as well as support datacentre sector growth. Entire ecosystems are being evaluated. Upcoming infrastructure refreshes look likely to reap the benefits of currently evolving data, frameworks and metrics.
“Companies must understand where their carbon emissions sit and what’s causing impacts or generating those emissions, and really pinpoint the detail to realise savings,” says Healy.
Mary Jacques, director of global environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and regulatory compliance at Lenovo, agrees. It is continuing to focus on full carbon accounting, increasingly homing in on Scope 3 supplier emissions, partly in response to customer requirements across its portfolio. It’s not about taking your foot off the pedal temporarily in response to unfavourable economics, she says.
With AI particularly, there’s demand to understand full impacts and help customers build up AI investments and infrastructure “in the right way”, Jacques adds. “These are long-term commitments by their nature,” she points out. “Ours, including the net-zero targets, remain the same.”
Better news to come?
Progress towards lower emissions continues under the surface of reports, commentators suggest. For example, bidirectional information flows between Lenovo, customers and suppliers are still developing, but ultimately, organisations will better quantify and reveal progress on emissions.
Michael O’Hara, founder of not-for-profit support group Techies Go Green, is aware of economic pressures affecting organisational emissions reduction plans. That said, he believes what’s going on is more a readjustment of expectations and deflation of greenwash, even overhyped “green growth”.
“It’s like in the 1990s – the internet was going to change how we did business, and there was huge investment, and then the dot com crash. But slowly, surely, the ‘enlightenment’ period happened, maybe 10 years later,” says O’Hara. “The sustainability hype kicked in after the 2016 Paris Agreement and Biden took office, and when BlackRock said they’d prioritise sustainability investments in 2020.”
If he’s right, going green looks about halfway along. O’Hara says we can still see longer-term sustainability and profitability. Short-term thinking can be the enemy in business, as much as in politics with leaders only looking to their next election.
Among our members, there’s still positive sentiment, but there is a slowness in moving forward and putting in the investment. [In fact] a lot of [previous] net-zero goals have been too high Michael O’Hara, Techies Go Green
“Among our members, there’s still positive sentiment, but there is a slowness in moving forward and putting in the investment. To be honest, a lot of [previous] net-zero goals have been too high,” O’Hara says.
Over time, though, he expects emissions reduction to embed into company cultures, not least as data and transparency improve, with teams increasingly buying into the requirements. Until now, this has proven difficult in many companies, with sustainability sometimes tasked to the marketing person or receptionist, rather than someone with physical levers to pull. A lot of education and information communication still remains to be done as well.
O’Hara points out that people are still joining Techies Go Green – it now has 650-plus members and targets 1,000. That suggests many still take emissions reduction seriously.
Ben Brial, founder of green platform engineering company Cycloid, agrees there’s progress, especially on carbon accounting. Yet “short-cut” generative AI (GenAI) projects, such as China’s DeepSeek, should remind industry that alternative paths to innovation can exist beyond brute-force financial scaleup.
“Prior to AI, many had this mindset about ‘we grow at any cost’. The goal was to go faster, regardless of resource use,” says Brial.
But organisations can develop new, more economical, more sustainable methods and strategies, including in emissions reduction.
“Cheaper is not new, but the idea of pushing to use less resources is kind of a new game-changer,” says Brial. “We can think our way to different solutions and ways of achieving our priorities, goals and objectives.”
