A study by Accenture and Vodafone builds on the work of the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) report Smart 2020: enabling the low carbon economy in the information age to provide some specific c examples of how telecommunications can help to reduce CO2 emissions. Jeremy Green tells us what he thinks of the contents.

The report covers 25 EU countries, as well as Australia and India. Eighty percent of the identified carbon savings would be enabled by machine-to-machine services. In India alone some 80Mt of CO2e could be saved in the electricity generation, transmission and consumption sector, says the report.

The study concludes that machine to machine communications could remove 113Mt of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent, including other greenhouse gases), as well as cutting energy spend by €43 billion. Vodafone's interest is that the deployment on this scale would mean around a billion connections for mobile operators by 2020 within the EU25 countries.

The GeSI report claimed that ICT could deliver 7.8Gt of CO2e savings, representing 15% of total CO2e emissions in 2020. The Accenture-Vodafone analysis begins with a long list of 30 possible carbon-reduction opportunities, reducing these to a shortlist of 13, organised into similar categories as used by GeSI. The categories were:

• smart logistics - through improved fleet, vehicle and supply chain management
• smart grids - through management of the electricity generation and transmission network, enablement of local microgeneration and end-user response to power-load conditions
• smart manufacturing - through realtime monitoring of high-value equipment
• smart cities - through advanced traffic management
• dematerialisation - through remote working schemes, video conferencing and e-commerce.

Other potential applications were excluded, depending on the overall opportunity for carbon reduction, and the level of enthusiasm expressed by key stakeholders in a series of interviews. These included:

• mobile media data management
• e-invoice
• RFID-enabled e-ticketing
• mobile power management
• ecentralized back-up servers
• mobile delivery notification (logistics and infrastructure)
• globalised building management systems
• building monitoring systems
• water supply micro monitoring
• smart metering: water consumption
• smart metering: customised energy sourcing
• onboard modal switch terminals
• RFID-enabled goods quality tracking
• RFID-enabled warehouse management
• on-demand manufacturing
• manufacturing synchronisation.

To the authors' credit, the report contains detailed and strong recommendations as to what should be done to encourage and stimulate the deployment of technology-based approaches to emissions reduction. It rightly gives first place to the need to "deliver an effective price for carbon".