Green talk is the first step, action must follow
According to researchers, the carbon footprint of a one-hour mobile phone call is 1,000 times smaller than the environmental load of the travel required for a face-to-face meeting. What else can the communications industry do to raise its environmental performance? unite looks into the work of the GSM Association to find out.
‘You can’t manage what you don’t measure’. It’s an old business adage that’s hitting home for the
communications industry as it strives to further improve and quantify its environmental performance.
“We have made a good start on documenting our industry’s impact on the environment and explaining the full picture to stakeholders, but more work is clearly needed,” explains Dr Jack Rowley, Director of Research and Sustainability at the GSM Association (GSMA). “To do that we need to identify a common metric. Should we measure CO2 emissions per minute of conversation, per subscriber, or per Mbit of data transferred – or something else? This kind of standard is fundamental to setting targets for improvement.”
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“Our message is that cooperation is a real benefit to everyone in terms of harmonization of metrics – competition will then drive improved performance.”
Dr Jack Rowley, Director of Research and Sustainability, GSM Association