Thierry Van Landegem Chairman, GreenTouch, Vice President, Global Operations, Bell Labs
Growing Green: Partnering a Green Future with Sustainable Economic Growth.
29 October, 2014
Early last week, the 3GF brought together leaders from business, governments, finance and civil society to discuss models for sustainable growth. The 3GF, the Global Green Growth Forum, is a platform for innovative solutions and partnerships that drive green growth. This Forum is part of an ongoing action to reduce the risk of climate change: the UN Climate Summit in New York provided sufficient political action to achieve a green future; the recently issued New Climate Economy Report shows that all countries have the opportunity to fuel green economic growth. And the emphasis is clearly on ‘green’ AND ‘economic’ growth – contrary to the belief that green does not go hand in hand with economic growth.But there is still a lot to do when browsing through the various industrial sectors. It is only in those sectors where the major stakeholders have joined forces, that green growth is starting to happen. Green off-grid energy solutions are emerging as a viable solution for providing access to electricity in remote rural areas. Urban development initiatives will influence consumption patterns of the future. New rules for financial systems will encourage sustainable long term investments.
In this respect, what we do in GreenTouch is remarkable. The talk at the conference was about partnerships: Four years ago, we brought together all the major stakeholders of the ICT sector. The talk was about ambitious goals for green growth: we set ourselves the ambitious goal of improving energy efficiency in communication networks. We are de-risking, proposing and demonstrating new technologies and architectures that will find their way in our members products and services, products and services that will allow to build more energy efficient networks. Networks that will make other industries not only more efficient, but also more energy efficient. And that will lead to green growth across society. Building a better future for generations to come.
We have roughly half a year to go with GreenTouch, We will have our face to face gathering in a few weeks. When discussing, think about your role building the technologies for these networks of the future, think about the ever expanding role of ICT in our society, think about the role we play in building that sustainable society.
Thierry Van Landegem
Chairman, GreenTouch Executive Board