Good COP26, Bad COP26?
As COP26 drew to a close this past weekend, we thought we would take a look back on the last fortnight, discussing how the dedications made in Glasgow will affect not only the future of the world, but also the future of technology in the coming decades.
Despite his legendary status, even Sir David Attenborough couldn’t stop Prime Minister Boris Johnson from not wearing a mask- as the beloved documentary filmmaker and activist made his powerful speech to over 120 political leaders on the opening day of the conference, declaring that bold action must be taken in order to save the planet. And in spite of Prince Charles falling up the stairs to the podium, and US President Joe Biden falling asleep during important discussions, it appears that the conference did make some steps in the right direction to helping the world cope with the climate change crisis, and may have even put some plans in place to help to reduce the earth’s temperature from rising more than 1.5C.
But It’s not surprising that the road closures and general disturbance to Glasgow, as well as the vast presence of security accompanying attendees put people’s backs up about the whole situation. And with Greta Thunberg making her Glasgow debut during an extinction rebellion march of roughly 100,00, it was clear that not only were the people of Glasgow split in their ideals about COP26, but the rest of the world remained skeptical about real change, as they watched the conference’s diplomats and other attendees willfully create excessive amounts of C02 by flying in on private jets or driving gas guzzling vehicles around the city.
But moving on from the negatives, what did the conference actually achieve? Well, the truth is the answer will vary depending on who you ask. For some it was more of a chance for world leaders to be seen to be trying to help, some feel that the declarations made during the fortnight were meaningful and will bring real change, and others saw COP26 as a political stunt with videos of Greta and AOC trying a taste of Irn Bru being the most significant result.
Week 1
After the first week, through discussions by several countries including Brazil, India, Russia, the USA and of course the UK, the first ever international commitment pledge was made to reduce the use of coal globally. New and more urgent targets were made in an effort to support the journey towards net zero emissions, as well as over 100 nations agreeing to end deforestation by 2030 — a particularly large step in combating climate change given the vast swathes of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest being chopped down over recent decades. Also, more than 80 countries also pledged to cut methane emissions by at least 30% by 2030, we just hope there will still be some forest left by 2030, and that these pledges aren’t just hot air…..
During the first week of the summit, thousands of protestors entered Glasgow to join the hundreds of children marching on the Friday, and afterwards listened to Greta Thunberg address them in George Square, echoing the thoughts of many that the conference was simply a ‘tick-box’ exercise for these leaders, pointing out the ridiculous amount of emissions caused by the summit in the first place. Since we’ve all spent the past year getting overly comfortable with video conferences, we can’t help but wonder why they couldn’t have done this over Zoom?
Although the first week seemed of the summit seemed to have made good progress despite the media focusing on the faults of those present, there were many areas still up for discussion — especially after countries such as India changed the wording of certain documents from “phasing out” to “phasing down,” indicating that maybe some leaders were not as confident in their ability to commit to such drastic changes. Large countries like India and China seem to have been the most reluctant when it came to deciding on deadlines near in the future, and the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, promised to hit the necessary net-zero targets almost 20 years behind the date the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated highlighted as the point of no-return to keep the average global temperature from raising 1.5C.
Week 2
The second and final week of the summit began with CEOs from companies including UniLever and IKEA discussing how, in wealthier countries, consumers drive the pace for climate change rather than the governments — making sustainable decisions before governmental policies are implemented. While it has generally become common knowledge, this business-led panel showed again that the world’s less fortunate countries need the most help in achieving goals set at the summit. Seniors from Amazon joined on Tuesday to highlight the positive uses of the cloud in tackling climate change — but were clear that more still needs to be done in order to reduce the world’s digital carbon footprint, as it currently produces 4% of global CO2. The remainder of the summit’s final week focused on areas such as transport and city emissions, as two-thirds of carbon dioxide emissions come from the cities of the world. Despite COP26’s planned finish on Friday, negotiations continued late into the early-hours of Saturday morning — either a representation of the commitment of attendees, or a testament to the sheer amount of problems that relate to climate change.
Despite Glasgow pulling off the summit successfully as a city, with much praise from world leaders on the conference’s organisation and the beauty of the city (good thing that trash was picked up), ultimately COP26 left behind some of the important issues that were expected to be at least discussed — including carbon finance. With some of the poorest countries being left without help from other nations, how are they expected to aid in this climate crisis? The Glasgow Climate Pact failed in delivering financial assistance to help those poorer countries deal with the damage caused by climate change — as wealthier nations broke promises made to provide £74bn per year by 2020.
It is the belief of Mark Carney — UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance — that the financial initiatives announced at the summit could deliver the estimated $100trn (yes, trillion) of investment needed globally over the next thirty years for clean energy to become viable world-wide. However, it is clearly up to the nation’s governments to create robust objectives backed-up with strong policies, to ensure that the opportunities granted through these investments are seized.
With a magnifying glass being placed over Scotland over the last month, it has allowed us as a company to reflect on the ways in which we strive to keep our carbon footprint low, as well as the potential damage that technology could be making to the planet as it continues to advance and consume more energy to keep server banks running and cool.
How can Technology change to aid the Climate Change Crisis?
New technological innovations such as Artificial Intelligence have dramatically altered the way in which we live our lives today, and don’t seem to be going anywhere (we hope not). Even though Siri and Alexa can’t help us save the rainforest or take back the damage the human race has already caused, can these tech innovations continue to happen without hindering the fight against global extinction? There are some organisations hoping that they can continue to produce new technology in the most sustainable way possible, including reduction in energy costs for servers, material wastage and pollution from production. Some of the world’s most physical problems such as energy consumption are causing large scale and industrial systems such as data centres to rethink how they conduct their operations. Google is one business which over the last ten years has been focusing more heavily on their energy consumption — building more efficient servers and ways of cooling their data centres. And despite Google’s best efforts, they are aware that real breakthroughs are few and far between when it comes to more sustainable technological practices — but the introduction of DeepMind’s machine learning to Google’s data centres have enabled a reduction of the amount of energy spent cooling servers by 40%, and with the sheer size of Google, a huge step forward in the right direction.
DragonflAI has also positioned itself to work in a server free manner. For both the purpose of our technology, and the overall reduction in server energy consumption, we have developed our tech to operate completely without server access while being used. In fact, the only time we use servers to develop is when training our algorithms, and even this is done efficiently by using smaller and more agile models to train quicker and use less energy both during training and when being integrated and used on a device. And while it may not be unusual, with many companies leaving the office environment in a pre-covid era, our decision to operate primarily from home has certainly helped reduce our carbon footprint on a company level, and since no one ever seems to put the right amount of oat milk in my tea when doing an office drink run, I can’t really complain.
Our hope is that the despite the backlash that it has received, that COP26 will have been a stepping stone in the right direction for tackling climate change and we can only hope that in the future more help will be given to those countries who feel that they are not able to make significant changes to their nation’s behaviours due to lack of financial support. It is essential that organisations such as ourselves are continuing to make conscious efforts to keep our technology as Eco-friendly and sustainable as possible, to align with the agreements made during the summit’s time in Glasgow that can make a real difference to the world.
