Aid for Rural Education Access Initiative, AREAi, and the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, will work together on the research on tech’s environmental impacts and the digital sector’s role in climate crisis.
Recall that the NCC reported that the total GHG emissions from the energy sector, which is a major enabler of Nigeria’s ICT and digital technology system, is about 34 per cent of the total net GreenHouse Gas emissions of Nigeria, making it the second major contributor of GHG in the
country.
Moreso, it is evident that the technology ecosystem has a growing “carbon footprint” and this is from greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions that stems from across all the life cycle stages of all technological processes from extraction of raw materials used for the production of software and hardware materials such as laptops, phones, television sets, desktops, among numerous others.
Speaking at a press conference in Abuja on Tuesday, Prince Gideon Olanrewaju – the Chief Executive Officer and Project Manager, AREAi, said that despite concerted efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE), the Information and Communication Industry (ICT) has received little attention even though it is a significant contributor to GHG emissions.
“This is the underlying fact that led to the design of this intervention,” he said.
“It is evident that ICT emissions will not reduce without major concerted efforts that involves broad political and industrial actions and more significantly, a coordinated response that leverages informal approaches in galvanizing key actions across the whole spectrum of involvement across the ICT sector including innovation hubs, technology start-ups, data processing centers and other producers, suppliers and consumers of digital hardware .
“At least in every home in Nigeria there is a mobile phone. There is also data from NCC to show Nigeria’s Internet connectivity.
“In relation 34 per cent of GreenHouse emission is done by the tech ecosystem. The tech ecosystem contributes 34 percent of the greenhouse emissions. This evident based. And this ecosystem is the second major contributor.
“We’ll work with the NCC and NITDA who are regulatory partners in telco system.”
SCALE stands for Smart Climate Awareness, Learning and Empowerment and will be leveraging on research approach, the urgent need to enrich the available evidence base on the role of tech ecosystem stakeholders towards reducing digital environmental footprint is premised on how their knowledge can enable them to 1. manage the life cycle analysis of their products and services, 2. adapt approaches for the measurement of the impacts associated with their IT assets and data centers, 3. innovate around the integration of new measures in all old and new IT processes, 4. develop Digital environmental KPIs.