With the increasing concern about environmental issues, many industries are being required to turn environment-friendly or to ‘green-out’ their activities. Though, when it comes to the ICT industries, aspirations are quite different; not only are these industries asked to amend their own working strategies to reduce their carbon footprints, but they are expected to come up with solutions for the already-existing problems in other industries.
“ICT affects the environment in many ways some are positive while others are negative,” said Sherif Abdel-Rahim, the head of minister’s technical office at the Ministry of State for Environment Affairs yesterday in a panel that was part of Cairo ICT 2010 activities.

Cairo ICT, in its fourteenth year, was inaugurated on Sunday with hundreds of companies participating and thousands of visitors in its first two days. This annual event runs until Wednesday in Cairo International Conference Center.

“Although ICT’s positive impacts are more than its negative impacts, the latter is extremely dangerous in the long run,” Abdel-Rahim continued.
Like most industries, the ICT industry has two major negative impacts on the environment. It produces harmful emissions during production, and then additional waste when the products reach the end of their life cycle.

“Green ICT is a way to decrease the negative impacts of ICT and strengthen its positive impacts,” Abdel-Rahim stressed.
Green ICT strategies will decrease the industry’s carbon footprint, increase productivity and decrease the consumption of energy and of raw materials and, consequently, wastes.

The question is: how to use and benefit from Green ICT?
“Awareness is the keyword for Green ICT to succeed,” Abdel-Rahim concluded. “People started to sense the importance and critical role of ICT recently with the swine flu fears where schools and universities used modern technology to broadcast its educational materials. We should use such incidents to teach people more about how to save the environment.

“Creating new environment-friendly devices isn’t enough if people don’t know how to use it correctly,” he concluded.
Hoda Baraka, first deputy to Minister of Communications and Information Technology, urged for cooperation between sectors.

“There must be more cooperation with the civil society,” Hoda said. “Everywhere in the world initiatives taken in this regard are mainly driven by the civil society, not just governments or the private sectors.”

ICT sector is expected to decrease 15 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions globally by 2020, through using and developing the so-called ‘Green Technology’, according to the recent international report ‘Smart 2020.’

“We measure our emissions regularly and do a lot of efforts to decrease it each three months,” commented Noha Saad, community service and foundation manager at Vodafone Egypt. “We have over 200 signal-strengthening hubs operating on solar energy. This is just an example of how our governance goes in the place and that’s why we are always calling people to understand and help saving the environment.”

So far, ICT has contributed remarkably in decreasing threats to the environment. Using emails and online publications in the past few years has played a huge role decreasing paper consumption and waste. As well, video conferences and chatting forums reduced the number of transportation trips, reducing traffic and pollution.

“ICT has more to offer and that’s why we expect more,” Saad concluded.