Our starting point in developing the seventh edition of Telenor’s Tech Trends report was that technology and digitalisation could be positive forces in enabling a much-needed green shift in society.
Once we are through the present pandemic, our biggest challenge will be climate change and environmental degradation.
For us at Telenor, it is key to understand how technology can both avoid being part of the climate problem and help in the transition. Energy-efficient data centres, greenfluencers, climate micro-degrees and ‘short travelled data’ are among the trends we identified that will impact us in 2022 and beyond.
Here are ways we envisage technological and social progress in 2022 can enable green transformation:
Green clouds on the horizon
Global data traffic from mobile phones downloading content and sharing images, videos and messages is growing rapidly. Moving this data across the globe also takes a lot of electricity, and massive datacenters are energy guzzlers. More than 1 per cent of the world’s energy is consumed in this way.
With 5G, data centres are going local. We believe that energy-efficient edge data centres reachable from mobile devices over 5G networks will start popping up, at an increasing rate, in 2022.
As a result, energy will also be saved in electricity and data distribution networks around the globe since part of the data traffic will be transferred locally only.
What’s perhaps even better is that small, local data centres can be built anywhere – in buildings, factories or shopping centres. They can be outfitted with solar cells when there is space, and in cold countries where heating rather than cooling buildings is the thing, excess heat from local data centers can be re-used.
Also Read: Sustainability: the new business reality
Big appetite for climate micro-degrees
In 2022, a growing number of businesses will implement green micro-degrees and courses as part of their ‘curriculum’ to quench the green knowledge thirst among employees.
Staff will become more eager to learn how to utilise digital technologies and innovations to help their employer is becoming more climate-friendly.
We believe that a confluence of factors will create a growing demand for climate and ‘green’ micro-degrees. The economy has to transition to sustainability which will mean more jobs with green technology and revamped processes in all industries to reduce CO2 and environmental impact.
This means that new jobs will be created and that old jobs will get new content, and this requires upskilling. Businesses that fail to facilitate opportunities to acquire green online learning credentials “on-the-job” risk being perceived as less attractive in the eyes of new talent.
Optimise everything
Computers, phones, and connected devices consuming electricity and emitting carbon dioxide now outnumber humans by four, and in the future, they will become even more dominant. Since transforming our energy supply will take time, we need to optimise everything – not least the use of energy by our devices.
A race is on to make every electronic device as energy-efficient as possible. In the future, we expect to see more companies put enormous sums of money on the table to acquire the knowledge and assets needed to come out on top of the optimisation battle.
A lot can be done in software and when building AI Models. Significant work is going into what is called ‘tiny machine learning.’ Here the objective is to run, for example, image recognition on small computers, less powerful than a mobile phone, for the internet of things.
New tools are also appearing. Apple and Google have energy measurement integrated with the developer environments they offer, and websites appear that attempt to measure the CO2 impact of your own. As always, to get to a better place, you need to know where you are starting from.
Also Read: Why sustainable power starts with data
Here comes the greenfluencers
Green activism through social media will surge, especially amongst the young, in the wake of what they perceive as yet another failed attempt by elderly politicians to take necessary actions to reach the goals of the Paris agreement.
An undergrowth of climate aware influencers and activists has emerged across niches on social media, and we believe the influencer universe’s established elite will duly notice their growing follower bases.
Influencers who appear oblivious or indifferent to climate challenges will be perceived as outdated. Instead, followers will flock to influencers who demonstrate climate awareness regardless of niche. Marketers will turn their attention in the same direction.
Don’t lose out on the ‘lost generation’
A new generation of employees is entering the workforce. Their expectations for work-life might diverge from the reality that hits them. Companies that don’t take the next generation’s expectations seriously risk facing great resignation.
The home office is here to stay, but despite the positive climate impact from reduced travel, working from home could turn out to be a bigger organisational challenge than lockdowns were.
Young people want to make a difference at the companies they join. But to be fully able to contribute to the development of their organisations, they first need to establish and grow a personal network as well as acquire a general understanding of the corporate culture.
Forming new social relations using only digital communication is much more challenging. More experienced employees, on the other hand, are having a much less troublesome transition due to already established personal networks and greater cultural understanding.
As a consequence, many companies will find that large groups of young employees who never got a proper onboarding are likely to struggle. And in 2022 their numbers could grow beyond what is manageable – unless good leadership is exercised.
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