Technology and Climate Change: The Importance of Sustainable Computing

[Music] hello everyone welcome to devsec talks i'm your host ashley ward and i'm joined today by akil handa ceo and founder of earth51 air51 is an organization focused on helping businesses embrace sustainability in today's episode we'll sit down with the queue to discuss the importance of climate change and sustainable computing and the steps that technology leaders can take to make their businesses healthier from the inside out let's dive right in thank you ashley and thank you for having me today hi everyone uh thank you for listening uh my name is akhil honda and um i work with uh a sustainability think tank called earth51 where uh we're based out of the uk but we have most of our clients flitted around the world especially in northern europe and um our goal is really to try and help businesses become better versions of themselves so that's why we're here all right so one of the things that i was really interested in when i looked up earth 51 of course is that we're all very aware it's the news every day at the moment about um climate change about how we need to be more responsible and and then i thought myself well speaking to you it'll be really really quick conversation because in reality we're just talking about computers right so i just need to get my electricity from somewhere good is that it yeah i think that's nicely put actually um it's certainly the part of the it's part of the sustainability challenge that's picked up most interest more than other areas so carbon climate change are certainly areas that we need to be very concerned about but as we've seen with the pandemic over the last year there have been other issues that have surfaced or at least have been brought to light so in addition to carbon and climate change we've also seen growing inequalities um the acceleration of digitization has also created a disparity in certain industries uh women have been unfairly impacted by it uh girls haven't been able to stay in stem skills for longer so we've had a lot of issues beyond just um you know climate change so we have issues that we tackle with our clients around food waste and poverty and hunger and health and education and it's just there's a much more uh there's a much more broader spectrum of issues that are out there that companies need to take more responsibility for so it's not just climate change and sustainability is a bit more than that and that's one of the fallacies that we find that companies believe is just carbon and climate change and i'm doing everything i can but actually private sector businesses for instance have tremendous influence that they can provide societal uplift a lot quicker than government policy and that's one of the reasons we try and work closely with private organizations to to try and help them you know lend their resources and help help society at large across various pieces from a technology leader's point of view if there are technology leaders who are listening to this i mean how do they go about prioritizing these things is this and would you you know say get engaged when we're doing a technology refresh or a project scoping or how do people get involved so given my background in tech for the last 25 years i do understand that technology refresh is usually one of the cycles in which we start to look at new innovation now i i think we are at that stage across the world today where we can't wait any longer we can't wait for the next three to five year refresh cycle to try and inject change and innovation so that's one part of it the other piece is that the world's moving tremendously quick from an analog slash paper-based reality to a to a digital future and technology has a massive role to play so everything that we do is pretty much enabled through technology and digitalization or digital tools so technology from our perspective is are the tools on which we're going to build our future and given it's given that importance i think if you're if you're a leader in a technology company or you're leading a technology business unit in a company we can't think about efficiencies and just doing the right thing and taking the box and making sure we're id and keeping the lights on and keep the business running this is a case about technology threading its way into the entire into all lines of business inside a business unit and making sure they're accelerating sustainable progress across every area of the business so i wouldn't say this is something where it's a it's an option to have i think it's a must-have and the quick organizations can use digital transformation the wave of digital transformation that they're going through right now to drive sustainability transformation that's where we need to make sure that that's the meeting ground investors employees customers governments they're all asking questions of every organization and to enable that change the transformation needs to come through tech so i think technology leaders have their hands full with this and should be taking this very seriously in terms of how do i enable my business to be a better business at the end of the day more purpose-led more focused on planetary goals but also people goals and that threads into every area of the business from hr functions to financial forecasting to using sustainability linked loans and green bonds and what have you it's all tech based at the end of the day so how do we as a technology business unit start to improve other lines of business inside our organization make us healthier from the inside i use the analogy of variables um or just data that we need to be healthier in our daily lives whether it be the amount of steps we need to take or you know keeping our resting heart rate down or what have you it's much the same with a technology leader inside a company we got to make sure that our business is beating in a healthy way so that's my viewpoint on it do you do you see though the um the benefit to the business so if i was to say as a technology leader i i completely i fully support this i've seen the poverty that's around the world and how we can build that greater sustainability putting climate change you know to one side as well that but how do i translate that to the business how do i turn around to my different lines of business and say um we need to do this not just because it's the right thing to do but because it will help us as a business again the way we've looked at this is there are multiple inflection points through history where businesses have had to transform and evolve and i think the last large evolution was with digital transformation where companies had to evolve from an analog world to a digital world there's some that haven't taken that step as yet some regions and markets are still slower off the block for their own challenges but largely everyone started to move in that direction cloud is a great analogy i remember six years back we spoke about cloud people thought it was a buzzword is it real is it really happening and i think now everyone's moving to the cloud or they've already moved and they don't even realize it and i think sustainability is in much the same state that cloud was in six years back where though we've got a lot of wins behind our sales um as you know a global business industry where there are a couple of things that are happening which need to happen for a massive inflection to take place one is you need to make sure that there's sentiment across the industry and in this case it's almost what happened with it where we had the consumerization of i.t where you brought your own devices and it was forced to change the way they started to do things we're having the consumerization of sustainability there's a tremendous public sentiment to try and do more uh be it you know be it just the millennials that are coming through which are primarily the they consist of 75 of the workforce they want to work for buy from invest in companies that are sustainable or purpose-led so they're willing to pay a little bit more so you have incremental revenue streams coming in from people who who are asking for this today um a lot of the new investment community and the young generation that's coming through wants to put their money not in companies that are drilling for oil to be honest they're looking for companies that are trying to safeguard their futures so the thinking has changed and this tremendous public sentiment so that's one part of it the second piece is money money is is required for everything in terms of driving change and evolving that piece we've seen the largest money managers on the planet starting to put their foot down and say look this cannot continue if you as a business refuse to move in the direction of sustainable progress we're going to start to switch off the tap on your revenue streams i'll give you an example um blackrock for those of you on the on the podcast today who haven't come across it is something called an asset fund management company they manage about think of them managing a large pot of money and when i say large they manage about 9 trillion dollars of revenue that's more than the gdp of germany you can france put together the guy who runs it is a chap called larry fink he's a ceo of blackrock and he's categorically told he he's punished 53 companies which i won't name and shame today but he punished 53 companies in july last year saying you're not doing enough from a sustainable standpoint so we're going to start to close the tap in terms of the amount of money that we can lend to you and at the same time he's categorically come out and said if you're not focused on one of the 17 united nations sustainable development goals we will not be investing with you now a lot of that money percolates down to pension funds it goes into it goes into other investment buckets and finally it goes to private equity and vcs or what have you but it it it filters down filtrates down into organizations such as the ones that we work in it'll be swimming upstream if we don't start to make those changes to try and answer your question on that it's a case of businesses will differentiate themselves today but it becomes a new normal tomorrow very very quickly so we're seeing stock markets or even during the covet crisis for instance money came out of the stock markets to the tune of about 800 billion in the first quarter after march 300 million when 300 billion went into the stock markets into renewable or purpose-led companies so it was almost the case of how we invest in gold during the worst crisis that we saw over the last century we found that money went into companies that were focused with a that had a purpose-led focus and money came out of companies that didn't have a future in terms of planetary and people focus so i hope that answers your question in terms of driving financial outcomes it really does actually you you had me when you were talking about even just from an employee point of view so people joining an organization want to believe in the organization that they're working for and they want to be contributing and that they're the organizational culture and the goals of the organization align align with them so i mean even that first point was was a big was a big point for me you know that if the organization isn't doing that then then people don't want to be there and then really the the money tap there as well is of course is a huge driver behind it so before we lose all the engineers that might be watching is this is it really it's too high up for them is it really sustainable development goals i mean that type of thing that's all managerial right there's not a lot an engineer is going to be doing is there so i'm a technologist at heart and that's what i thought and i started this for my own selfish reasons of differentiating cloud to be honest so try to sell more cloud and as part of that i used to go to clients and say why don't you migrate your applications to a greener more renewable cloud so that was my reason of starting this and from there i understood that actually there's a there's a large appetite for this so if you're an engineer you're not going to be an engineer forever you might be writing code today but you'll be running a team tomorrow and i also feel that you're the architects of today and tomorrow so how you run your devops environments for instance are you looking at and you might need a truckload of servers that you need to spin up for writing source code for whatever applications you're developing software development has a very strong carbon footprint today uh which we don't realize so can we just make sure that we spin up servers in virtual environments on renewable data centers at the back end simple things that we can start to do and when we start to look at the amount of server the service crawl that is used in development processes it gets quite large very quickly um i was reading a statistic just last night that private data centers today not cloud data centers it uh churn out something to the tune of three and a half percent of global carbon of the global carbon footprint which is scheduled to move to seven and a half percent by 2025. so in the next 25 years or so expect technology to have a carbon footprint larger than maybe seven other industries from travel hospitality aviation etc so the ict industry or the tech industry today already surpasses the aviation industry in terms of its carbon footprint so if you're developers engineers technology managers doesn't matter who we are can all be better in terms of what we're doing and if you're in the development community i would strongly recommend to try and get more girls in stem and try and get more women in tech i think that's that's the biggest disparity that i see across the board in most tech companies and i just feel that if technology is going to influence and shape our future we need to have our entire population on that so we need to be fighting on all cylinders so i think those are the lots of things that we can do and it doesn't matter what we're actually doing today but i think we've got to be conscious about you know how are we using energy to are we energy aware and also beyond the carbon side of it how are we running our business or our teams how how can we be better in that sphere look at just the the carbon side of things is it enough just to get a third party to do some offsetting for us um so offsetting is uh is a business today um and uh so the best way to answer that is at the end of the day we got to emit less than we um sorry we we got to reduce our carbon emissions so we are we we need to have net zero emissions at the end of the day offsetting really comes in if a company is just going to plant trees every time they run their business travel you know checkers i i think that's not the way to run the business and if the first step is to try and reduce your emissions from a carbon standpoint that's number one you can do that directly that's super easy in terms of what you control switching off the lights making sure you have a renewable provider that's providing electricity to your facilities or dc's or what have you then there's something called scope 2 emissions there's another layer to it in terms of employees using electric cars etc etc it's slightly indirect there's a third side of it called scope 3 emissions which gets very difficult so 70 of a companies or an organization's carbon footprint comes from scope 3 emissions and the scope 3 missions are usually the supply chain so if i'm if i'm in a manufacturing or automotive sector i've got steering wheels and certain parts coming from taiwan although my manufacturing facilities in munich germany for instance how do i start to reduce that footprint how do i make sure that i'm asking questions off my supplier based how do i make sure if i'm a tech company i'm not asking a 13 year old child in india or bangladesh to write code for me how am i making sure i'm verifying on age i'm reducing on child labor i'm making sure that i'm not marginalizing women in supply chains if i'm a fashion company stitching a shirt and making sure that women only the workers but never the managers so you can start to make changes across the board uh but definitely you know offset is a is what you'd want to do right at the end it's almost to try and recalibrate the balance to make it zero but it should be your last way forward ideally so sorry i gave you a long answer but i hope that gives you an answer that you can't really really fantastic really really good and the thing i like when i talk to people about just the technology side of things what always becomes apparent is that it's a much broader or deeper subject than you'd think and just the same way starting off this uh where i've got this idea that we're talking about carbon right it's so much more and it's so much i was about to say more important and not don't mean more important but such an important thing now that everything you've said if i was if i was a cto somewhere i'd go this is great but how do i get started what can i do or how can you help me get started yeah no that's a great question um but it's got a really simple answer which we've discovered as well because this is quite a new area as a company we sit somewhere between a management consultancy and a not-for-profit so we sandwich between two in the sense that we want to try and lend business advice but we want to try and drive societal good with the extra money that you can make so that's the way we set ourselves up um i believe the first thing that works for anyone who's listening and who's interested in this is to educate themselves um education it's we started backwards to be honest we went into advisory so we started advising clients and then clients turned around and said this is great but it's actually a cultural change i need to educate my my team my crew on the ship before i can start to steer it in a different direction so it doesn't matter if i'm the captain of the ship but i need to make sure that i need to steer my crew in the same direction because they're in the engine room and they're trying to move it across so i think education is where we start where we we turn back to when we started to tell clients that you know this is how you can educate yourself um we created a course um on sustainability leadership and that was really to try and dispel some of these myths that sustainability is not climate change there's more it's climate change is definitely so important there's more to it and why should business really care about it how does sustainability drive financial outcomes this is not prescriptive in terms of okay make sure you throw the banana peel in the right bin or make sure you recycle plastic those are very specific pieces that you can learn and educate yourselves i think it's about joining the dots in your own mind it doesn't matter whether you're chief of staff or your admin or your tech or you're in finance or hr or what have you you can make changes in your own sphere of work and i think in the past we have some college students who asked us saying if i do this course if i get certified will this help me in a career in sustainability and i feel that it's the flip of that it says we don't want to try and educate people um you know to develop careers in sustainability i think you should develop sustainability into your careers no matter what you're doing and i think that's really important thread it into your dna so educate yourselves number one we can help but there's so much out there and if there's one area you really want to try and pick up on i would say just focus on the united nations sustainable development goals these are 17 goals framed together it's think of it as the largest sustainability footprint on sorry blueprint on the planet set together about the un in 2015 it's a 30-year it's a it's a 15-year plan set to finish on 2030 and 193 countries have signed up to it so it's it's a wonderful blueprint across multiple areas and you can pretty much do a health check and measure yourself across you know what am i doing around poverty education food waste health life on land life and water et cetera et cetera it covers so many different areas so educate educate educate and then after that seek advice from companies that can come in and help you with various pieces no one is doing this perfectly no matter what anyone says this is such a new area but get started i think that's important everyone should just get started that's fantastic and you didn't push uh push your organization off so earth51.com is it is that the uh the url for people to go to yeah earth51.com uh we're uh we're a very uk based think tank as i mentioned and we do help with advice but i think more than the advice the advice almost comes second the education piece is something that we've seen a lot of traction with and we've had school kids from the age of 13 and 14 all the way to ceos of large companies take the same course it's the same thing it's the same playground at the end of the day this is our planet and what can we do to make it better thank you to akil handa for providing so much valuable insight on sustainable computing and thank you for tuning in to this episode of devsect talks remember to visit the link in the description below for more info on this series and be sure to subscribe and turn on channel notifications to be the first to know about our upcoming episodes if you're interested in being part of the devsect talks series or if you have any topics you'd like to hear more of feel free to let us know in the comments below i'll see you next time [Music] you

2022-05-03 04:11

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