Giving the planet a head start

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What do bicycle-powered reading lights, Prince Charles and one of the world’s biggest IT companies have in common?

The answer is they are all present, or involved, in a project called Start. Start bills as “a national initiative… to promote and celebrate sustainable living,” which accounts for the bike. And it is organised by the Prince's Charities Foundation, so that explains the involvement of Prince Charles.

So what’s IBM doing there? The IT company has arranged a nine-day conference programme looking at a whole range of issues that affect sustainability and society. These include those with a more obvious link to technology, such as transportation, supply chains and energy efficiency, and those that are more remotely connected, but no less important, such as skills.

According to Stephen Leonard, IBM’s UK chief executive, the thinking behind the event was to bring together new ideas around sustainability, technology, and the way we do business.

IBM-ers are fond of their statistics – “there are more transistors in the world than there are grains of rice” is one that will be repeated many times during the event – but Leonard has a point.

The point is that the modern infrastructure we all depend on depends, in turn, on technology. The theme for the first day’s session of the summit was smarter cities. By 2050 – another statistic – almost two-thirds of the population will live in a city.

The pressure is on companies such as IBM, as well as the public authorities, to work out ways of enabling that many people to live together safely, productively and in a sustainable way.

There are some interesting ways of doing this. Smart meters and smart electricity grids make better use of the energy resources we have. Leonard talks about updated public transport systems that cut the average commute by 10 minutes each way. This has an immediate benefit in terms of reducing carbon emissions, IBM says.

Again, it is not about travelling faster – which would pump out more CO2 - but being smarter, for example through improved signalling on trains. The same applies to initiatives in the supply chain, and on analytics: it is about doing things better, rather than always trying to do more.

There is, though, a long way to go to connect this type of thinking to the day-to-day pressures faced by IT departments. Bicycle-powered lights make for a good demo at an environmental conference but they are not going to make an impact on the data centre. Nor is it immediately clear how businesses will move green improvements from being a “nice to have” to something they really must do, especially if they require upfront capital spending. And the UK needs to do more, much more, to create an environment for investment in clean technologies.

No doubt some of the answers to these questions will become clearer over the coming week. And you have to admire IBM’s ambition when it comes to its Smarter Planetinitiative, not least for its part in raising awareness. Even if they do drown everything in statistics.

[li]More information on the IBM Summit at Smart can be found here.

Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT PRO.

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