Hard drive: how CIOs can propel their firms to net zero

Almost a third of British busi­ness­es have signed up to the Unit­ed Nations’ Race to Zero cam­paign, while all large com­pa­nies reg­is­tered in the UK are required to dis­close their plans for achiev­ing net-zero green­house gas emis­sions before next year.

Each firm will be expect­ed to cal­cu­late its car­bon foot­print, estab­lish long- and short-term reduc­tion tar­gets with a sound basis in sci­ence, allo­cate funds and mon­i­tor progress.

They must con­sid­er not only the oper­a­tional emis­sions under their direct con­trol (scopes one and two), but also the scope-three emis­sions that arise at each end of their val­ue chains. Upstream scope-three emis­sions include those gen­er­at­ed by sup­pli­ers. Down­stream ones include those cre­at­ed by the con­sump­tion and dis­pos­al of its prod­ucts by cus­tomers.

This is a huge change that will require strate­gic-lev­el input from every mem­ber of the C suite – includ­ing the CIO. 

“The CIO and their team play a cru­cial role in their company’s car­bon-reduc­tion pro­gramme. This is espe­cial­ly true when that com­pa­ny, like ours, is a tech firm with a dig­i­tal offer­ing,” says Roy Aston, group CIO at online pay­ments provider Paysafe. “They can fac­tor envi­ron­men­tal con­sid­er­a­tions into their entire tech­nol­o­gy strat­e­gy, includ­ing ensur­ing that they’re adopt­ing a green approach with their IT infra­struc­ture – how they build their tech, store data and recy­cle equip­ment. They have influ­ence in so many areas.”

One of the biggest envi­ron­men­tal wins can come from shift­ing to a pub­lic cloud com­put­ing ser­vice. In a 2021 study com­mis­sioned by Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) – a major provider of cloud ser­vices – ana­lysts at 451 Research report­ed that cloud servers are rough­ly three times more ener­gy effi­cient than the com­put­ing resources of the aver­age Euro­pean com­pa­ny.

The researchers also found that most busi­ness­es don’t pri­ori­tise the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of their data-cen­tre infra­struc­ture, includ­ing its asso­ci­at­ed ener­gy costs.

“Switch­ing to cloud com­put­ing reduces the elec­tric­i­ty con­sumed by data cen­tres by con­sol­i­dat­ing plat­forms and trans­fer­ring more trans­ac­tion­al sys­tems to the provider,” Aston says. “At Paysafe, we have moved about 70% of our work­load into the cloud and con­sol­i­dat­ed or decom­mis­sioned many of our old sys­tems and data cen­tres.” 

Accord­ing to the 451 Research study, AWS’s clients could poten­tial­ly cut the green­house gas emis­sions of an aver­age work­load by up to 96% once the com­pa­ny meets its goal to be pow­ered by 100% renew­able ener­gy, which it says it’s set to do by 2025.

Google has pledged to do the same before 2030, while Microsoft reck­ons that it will actu­al­ly be car­bon-neg­a­tive by that time.

Setting up sustainable partnerships

CIOs should also con­sid­er how they work with their part­ners, advis­es Mar­tin Riley, direc­tor of man­aged secu­ri­ty ser­vices at cyber­se­cu­ri­ty spe­cial­ist Bridewell Con­sult­ing, which has been car­bon-neg­a­tive since Octo­ber 2021. 

“The right part­ner will show a com­mit­ment to being car­bon-neg­a­tive through off­set­ting and com­mu­ni­ty-led renew­able ener­gy ini­tia­tives, enabling com­pa­nies to bal­ance out their own foot­prints,” he says.

Estab­lish­ing a sus­tain­able sup­ply chain means con­sid­er­ing not only direct sup­pli­ers but every link beyond them, inform­ing these play­ers about best prac­tice and pro­vid­ing them with sus­tain­abil­i­ty train­ing. And, says Arthur Hu, CIO of elec­tron­ics man­u­fac­tur­er Leno­vo, a code of con­duct and clear tar­gets need to be estab­lished from the start as part of a for­mal process. 

“Make envi­ron­men­tal, social and cor­po­rate gov­er­nance con­sid­er­a­tions part of your pro­cure­ment process – for exam­ple, updat­ing your eval­u­a­tion score­cards to include an ESG com­po­nent,” Hu advis­es. “Com­mu­ni­cate clear­ly and ahead of time via exec­u­tive inter­locks with sup­pli­ers so they can pre­pare. In this way, you can extend your influ­ence beyond your com­pa­ny and into an ecosys­tem that reflects the organisation’s pri­or­i­ties.”  

Leno­vo, he reveals, is on track to be pur­chas­ing 90% of its elec­tric­i­ty from renew­able sources and remov­ing 1 mil­lion tons of green­house gas emis­sions from its sup­ply chain by 2025. The com­pa­ny has set itself a dead­line of 2030 for cut­ting its scope-one and two emis­sions in half and reduc­ing scope-three emis­sions through­out its val­ue chain by 25%.

Giv­en that many CEOs won’t be in the same post in years to come, their firms would be well advised to set their envi­ron­men­tal com­mit­ments in stone to ensure con­ti­nu­ity of effort under new man­age­ment. This can be done by sign­ing up for projects such as the Sci­ence Based Tar­gets ini­tia­tive or the B Cor­po­ra­tion cer­ti­fi­ca­tion scheme.

Moham­mad Kamal Syed is chief invest­ment offi­cer and head of asset man­age­ment at pri­vate bank Coutts, which achieved B Corp sta­tus last year. One of the advan­tages of seek­ing such cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, he says, is that the so-called B Impact Assess­ment tool (BIA) “pro­vides us with a clear idea of what we need to change, such as process­es and frame­works, to enable us to become a more sus­tain­able busi­ness. The out­put BIA scores then help us find a way to track our sus­tain­able progress.”

A glob­al sur­vey of CIOs con­duct­ed by IBM late last year found that 42% of respon­dents expect­ed tech­nol­o­gy to have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on sus­tain­abil­i­ty over the next three years.

Hu notes that, giv­en how tech­nol­o­gy is “embed­ded in almost every aspect of any organ­i­sa­tion, the CIO can ensure that envi­ron­men­tal efforts remain front and cen­tre in much of their company’s deci­sion-mak­ing. We’re often at the table when set­ting objec­tives and key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors, so we can advo­cate for mea­sur­ing the enterprise’s cli­mate impact as part of our per­for­mance met­rics.”

He adds: “The eas­i­est wins are like­ly to come in areas that the CIO can con­trol direct­ly – inter­nal deci­sions to pri­ori­tise green­er tech­nolo­gies.”