Why AI Growth Intensifies the Need to Decarbonise ICT
Decarbonising the ICT sector matters because its footprint is already significant, is growing fast, and is tightly coupled to the AI and data-centre boom. Recent analyses estimate that ICT is responsible for at least 1.7-2% of global greenhouse gas emissions [1] and around 4% of global electricity use, once you count networks, data centres and user devices across their lifecycles. Electricity use in the sector’s use phase has risen from about 940-1,000 TWh in 2020 to roughly 1,100 TWh in 2024 [2], while the traffic and subscriptions continue to rise and during 2024, investments in renewables energy grew more slowly compared to previous years. Data centres alone consumed roughly 300-380 TWh in 2023 [3] (around 1-1.5% of global electricity) and are projected to more than double their demand by 2030 to around 945 TWh, driven largely by AI workloads. Without targeted efficiency and decarbonisation measures, several projections suggest data centres could approach 3% of global electricity demand by the end of the decade, with AI responsible for a rapidly growing share of that load.
The Problem: A Fragmented Jungle of Information
The green transition of ICT is on the radar, but the information landscape around it is a complex jungle and fragmented, with research papers, standards, industrial roadmaps and policy documents all evolving in parallel yet rarely speaking a common language. Network engineers, sustainability professionals, policymakers, investors, and knowledgeable citizens frequently encounter only fragments of the overall picture, making it challenging to grasp the direction of the sector and to define what effective practices entail.
Green ICT Digest by Project EXIGENCE: A Thematic Hub Solution
The Green ICT Digest from the EXIGENCE project addresses fragmentation by providing an organised, evolving overview of energy-efficient, climate-focused digital infrastructure that is useful for various stakeholders. Instead of being yet another long report, it acts as a thematic hub around topics like 6G architectures, energy measurements and metrics, green orchestration, policy and regulation, and standardisation, with clear links to requirements, scenarios, solutions assessment and exploitation paths.
The need for such a digest becomes obvious when looking at the recurring problem statements in the Green ICT and Green IT literature. Firstly, the body of knowledge surrounding Green ICT is intricate and rapidly advancing. New standards are emerging in organisations like the ITU-T (e.g., L-series), ETSI, 3GPP, and IETF providing evolving methodologies for measuring network and equipment energy efficiency, and significant increases in research on topics ranging from green data centres to circular economy strategies.
This creates an overwhelming volume of information that is difficult for any individual practitioner to fully monitor. Secondly, the absence of universally harmonised metrics and methods persists; different standards and initiatives may provide overlapping yet distinct KPIs and testing procedures, complicating comparison and benchmarking and introducing sensitivity in political contexts. Thirdly, although many organisations acknowledge the value of Green ICT, they often lack the resources, expertise, or motivation to interpret complex technical documents and develop actionable roadmaps or investment plans, resulting in slow or partial adoption of best practices. Fourthly, sustainability challenges within ICT are systemic and highly complex, involving operators, vendors, policymakers, users, and civil society. However, knowledge exchange among these stakeholders remains limited or predominantly one-directional. Finally, businesses and investors frequently find it challenging to link standards and academic findings with tangible commercial benefits, leading to perceptions of high costs, uncertain returns, and reluctance to undertake ambitious initiatives, even when technically viable.
Figure 1: Green ICT Digest as a shared knowledge Hub for Energy and CO2 aware ICT
EXIGENCE’s Green ICT Digest directly addresses these problems by offering a curated, cross‑cutting and regularly updated overview of architectures, metrics, policies and incentives that is explicitly organised for multi‑stakeholder use. For example, when an updated recommendation like ITU‑T L.1310 refines energy efficiency metrics and measurement methods for telecommunication equipment, or when guidance related to long‑term trajectories such as those in the L.14xx series evolves, the digest can translate these technical changes into accessible narratives: what has changed, why it matters. In that sense, it functions both as an early‑warning system for important shifts and as an explanatory layer that makes standards and high‑level policy visible at one place for day‑to‑day understanding.
ICT Digest Empowers the ICT Value Chain (Stakeholder by Stakeholder)
Network Operators
For network operators, the EXIGENCE green ICT digest can become a strategic reference that reduces the time spent hunting for scattered documents and meetings trying to interpret them. It helps them see which energy and environmental KPIs are emerging as de facto benchmarks, how base‑station site energy efficiency and other site‑level metrics are defined, and how different power‑saving features, site designs and orchestration strategies can realistically change energy per bit and total emissions. At the same time, it gives regulatory and policy context, so that compliance with reporting or metering requirements is not treated as an afterthought but as an integral part of network evolution and ESG strategy.
Equipment Vendors
For equipment vendors and solution providers, the digest acts as a radar for the expectations forming around their products. By tracking which measurement methodologies and metrics are being referenced in tenders, regulation and investor questions, vendors can align roadmaps on issues like fine‑grained energy metering, support for sleep modes and more efficient cooling or power systems. They can also borrow the language and evidence summarized in the digest to explain quantifiable environmental benefits in a way that is consistent with recognised standards, instead of reinventing their own ad‑hoc indicators that customers struggle to compare.
Cloud and Edge Providers
Cloud and edge providers, who sit at the intersection of infrastructure and workload, can use the digest to better connect infrastructure‑level metrics such as data‑centre or network energy efficiency with higher‑layer optimisation strategies like workload placement and scheduling. As regulatory scrutiny grows on the combined footprint of data centres, connectivity and digital services, the digest helps these providers anticipate how multi‑tenant environments, edge deployments and cross‑border traffic might be treated in emerging reporting frameworks. This enables them to design architecture and orchestration policies that are not just technically efficient today but also robust against future regulatory and investor expectations.
Enterprises and Vertical Users
Enterprises and vertical users, often depend on ICT infrastructure but do not have the capacity to follow every methodological debate in Green ICT. For them, the digest distils what really matters into practical guidance: which efficiency metrics and metering capabilities they should ask for in procurement and SLAs, which quick‑win interventions in their own estates or usage patterns can cut energy and emissions, and how digital transformation roadmaps interact with corporate climate targets and science‑based pathways. This makes sustainability a design criterion for digitalisation (also referred to as digitainability) rather than a separate reporting exercise.
Policymakers and Regulators
Policymakers and regulators can treat EXIGENCE green ICT digest as a neutral radar screen on a rapidly evolving field. By following which methodologies and metrics have reached sufficient maturity and consensus, they can decide more confidently when to reference them in regulation or soft‑law guidance, and where additional instruments such as minimum reporting requirements, incentives or eco‑design criteria are needed to close gaps. At the same time, by reflecting multi‑stakeholder perspectives from research, industry and civil society, the digest can help avoid regulations that are either too weak to matter or too detached from operational realities to be implemented.
Investors and ESG Analysts
Investors and ESG analysts benefit from a more coherent picture of what robust Green ICT strategies look like. Instead of relying on glossy narratives or incomparable internal metrics, they can benchmark companies against recognised standards, sector‑wide trends in energy and lifecycle impacts, and concrete evidence of alignment with net‑zero trajectories. This, in turn, supports more accurate assessment of transition risks and investment opportunities in telecoms and digital infrastructure portfolios.
Researchers and Standards Developers
Researchers and standards developers gain both visibility and feedback from EXIGENCE green ICT digest that aggregates and contextualises their outputs. Their work becomes easier to discover and apply by practitioners across the ICT value chain, while usage patterns and recurring questions highlighted in the digest can inform future research agendas and standardisation priorities. This helps move the field beyond narrow optimisation effects towards more systemic questions around circularity, e‑waste, rebound effects and socio‑technical transitions.
Citizens and Civil Society
Finally, for citizens and civil society, a Green ICT Digest can open a debate that is often dominated by either highly technical detail or simplistic soundbites about “data being the new oil” or “streaming being worse than flying”. By explaining in accessible language where ICT‑related impacts arise, what options exist to mitigate them, and how policy and industry practices are evolving, the digest empowers people to participate more meaningfully in public consultations, advocacy and everyday digital choices.
Conclusion
As AI accelerates demand for ICT connectivity, computing, and data‑centre capacity, the need for a unified understanding of metrics, standards, policies & regulations, and practical measures becomes urgent. EXIGENCE Green ICT Digest fills this gap by acting as a shared compass for an entire sector that must decarbonise while simultaneously enabling the wider sustainability transition. Engaging with it is both a time‑saver and a coordination mechanism: it allows operators, vendors, policymakers, investors, researchers and citizens to orient themselves against the same evolving map, and to turn dense technical work on energy measurements, metrics, orchestration and incentives into concrete action along the ICT value chain.
References
- World Bank and International Telecommunication Union, “Measuring the Emissions and Energy Footprint of the ICT Sector: Implications for Climate Action”. World Bank and ITU, 2024. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41238 License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. doi: 10.1596/978-92-61-38541-5.
- Ericsson, “ICT sustainability: Decrease in ICT’s carbon footprint slows down,” Ericsson Mobility Report, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts/ict-carbon-footprint-decreasing
- G. Kamiya and V. C. Coroamă, “Data Centre Energy Use: Critical Review of Models and Results”. EDNA – IEA 4E Technology Collaboration Programme on Energy Efficient End-Use Equipment, March 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.iea-4e.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Data-Centre-Energy-Use-Critical-Review-of-Models-and-Results.pdf
Authors
Detecon International
Dr. Shivam Gupta at Detecon International manages AI, Data Analytics, and Sustainability, leading their digitainability efforts. With over 10 years’ experience, a PhD in Geoinformatics, and over 20 publications, he advises global entities and delivers data-driven solutions. He co-developed “digitainability” and contributes to data-driven sustainability policies.
Detecon International
Marvin Sanchez Garache holds an Eng. degree in Electronics and a Ph.D. from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden. His extensive career includes roles as a researcher and professor at UNI, a postdoctoral researcher at Glasgow Caledonian University, and various leadership positions in telecommunications across the globe. He is currently a consultant at Detecon, specialising in wireless networks, intellectual property, telecommunication regulation, and Green ICT.
Detecon International
Konstantin Marin is Senior Manager with Detecon International GmbH, Dresden, Germany. With over 15 years of telecommunication industry experience he is DETECON’s technology expert in the Telco Industry Cluster, covering variety of topics in radio access and mobile core including 5G, 6G and Open RAN, and execution projects in the area of sustainability and energy efficiency for mobile operators in Europe and MEA region.