technologists who had their fingers on the pulse of the industry what other topics it should include in next year’s survey. Sustainability came up repeatedly, with the additional information that broadcasters were especially struggling with it. The company’s first instinct was that sustainability was more about ESG policies than the tech innovation insights Altman Solon was looking for. “But then we started thinking about it,” Powell recalls. “The IT industry isn’t necessarily known for being super environmentally friendly, and it brings up the question: what are they going to do about it? We started educating ourselves around some of the other trends and influences around sustainability and we saw, with the impeding legislation in multiple places, that we needed to get on this bandwagon, so we added ten or 12 questions to the next survey.” The questions had a deliberately wide focus to try capturing media- industry sustainability thinking from multiple angles. “If we were either too niche or too focused in our questions, we thought we might miss out on other areas of the ecosystem that may be making some significant progress on this. We wanted to be able to provide some visibility end-to-end.” The snapshot provided by the round of sustainability questioning showed that it was appearing in many guises at a variety of levels. Some were grassroots, employee- led initiatives – around, for example, recycling. Other initiatives started in companies’ procurement departments. But the common thread was that to
get sustainability to work across a business requires participation by its leadership team. STRATEGISING SUSTAINABLY One of the central questions businesses – and individuals – have around sustainability is where to put the most focus. Recycling is an easy activity to get behind, but as far as lowering carbon emissions – which is the highest priority now globally – it has low impact. A focus on efficiency and reducing energy consumption inside the business has been a widely adopted pathway toward sustainability. Just about everything we do today incorporates cloud in some degree. There is growing focus on the power consumption of data centres, which is ballooning, especially as AI starts getting incorporated into more tools. Computer power isn’t the only thing consuming energy – keeping thousands of servers cool 24/7 also has a huge CO2 footprint. Water use is enormous in data centres as well. In 2021, Google’s data centres consumed around 4.3 billion gallons of water. The second big issue is measurement. How do you keep track of your sustainability progress? What benchmarks should you be using to determine success? There has been an explosion of accreditation, ratings and tracking systems over the past few years, of varying quality. These rarely use the same methodologies and almost none are interoperable with each other. Starting a sustainability programme is already daunting for some, but having to choose which methodology to employ and decide
which accreditations to buy into is doubly intimidating. Finally, sustainability is no longer some arcane procurement practice that you can occasionally mention in reports to the stakeholders. It’s something that is going to affect multiple parts of your business. So companies have to be able to convey their sustainability stories, not just to their customers but to their own teams – a challenge when they don’t always know themselves what that story is. Powell continues: “When people hear about sustainability inside their own business, the first thing they think is; ‘here’s another layer of bureaucracy and data collection I’ve got to do.’ I think that’s short-sighted and it’s not what the business is trying to achieve. Instead, the goal should be ‘sustainability excellence.’ It’s an opportunity to look at a process and start thinking about how to insert and integrate sustainable practices that are going to help me get the output I need – as well as scale. “And it’s not just taking apart what you do and putting it back together. There must be adjacent sectors that have already solved some of these problems, and we can learn from them. Instead of trying to recreate the wheel or learn by trial and error, there are opportunities where we can learn from other industry groups.” Fields like medical and security are collecting and managing large amounts of data in very complex ways, often with high-resolution image or video components. Companies that work with sustainability in infrastructure are having to deal with scale and complexity that dwarf the
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