The Climate Crisis Hasn’t Gone Away. We All Must Commit To Radical Sustainability

Michael O’Hara

Managing Director

Michael has created a channel focused company that is passionate about helping our partners grow their business, through innovative sales, marketing and technical activities.

It’s been difficult to think of anything beyond coronavirus over the past twelve months. COVID-19 and its effects have dominated our thoughts, dictated our actions and reshaped our lives in ways we could never have imagined. Grappling with the impact of the pandemic has taken a collective, concerted effort and all our ingenuity.

But with our attention fixed on one crisis, we’ve forgotten the rapid escalation of another. Catastrophes don’t wait in queues and the climate emergency only grows more critical day by day. 2020 has already shown us the desperate consequences of our global warming inaction, with the IFRC responding to a record number of climate disasters in the Asia Pacific and Arctic sea ice shrinking to the second-lowest levels on record over the summer. The climate crisis will have even more devastating consequences than coronavirus but because these consequences aren’t as immediately visible, we think they won’t occur. This thinking isn’t just flawed, it’s fatal.

If we want to protect the planet and the billions of people who share it, we need to replicate the same energy and urgency we saw when tackling coronavirus. And, as with coronavirus, effective action is only possible if governments, businesses and individuals work together. It’s not too late to slow the pace of climate change and start working to reverse its effects. But it’s only possible if we all start acting now.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been important climate action and innovation occurring already. We just need to be intentional about embracing these new ideas and pushing them even further. For example, technology will and is having a huge part to play in responding to global warming, at both macro and micro levels. Thanks to technological advancements, solar and onshore wind power are now the cheapest sources of electricity for two thirds of the world’s population, with onshore wind power costing 44% less per megawatt-hour than it did ten years ago, and solar power costing a dramatic six times less. Driving down costs in this way makes renewable energy an attractive and financially viable alternative to oil, coal and gas power which are colossal contributors to global warming - coal is responsible for approximately one third of the 1°C increase in global average temperatures. Using technology to find new ways of serving our needs will play a crucial part in our fight against climate change.

It’s not just at a national and international scale that technology is helping tackle the climate crisis. New tech advancements are helping cut carbon emissions on an individual level too. Electric cars are gaining more and more traction - UK electric car sales rose by 144% in 2019 - and are helping reduce our reliance on polluting petrol and diesel. The spread of cloud technology is also helping businesses transform their processes and go paperless, although more work must be done to ensure the large amount of energy needed to power large data centres is drawn from renewable energy sources. Individual choices may seem insignificant on their own, but their collective impact is immense.

Yet it would be a mistake to pin all our hopes on technology alone. Tech innovation is great but by itself it won’t save us from the consequences of historic climate inaction. What’s needed is a simultaneous innovation in our thinking: a cultural transformation where we each recognise the critical role we play in responding to the climate crisis and make an unshakeable commitment to radical sustainability. We need to see this cultural transformation within governments, within businesses of every sector and within ourselves.

It’s easy to say the right things but change only happens with the hard work of doing them. That’s why at DataSolutions we’re owning our responsibility and setting ourselves ambitious, concrete targets to track and reduce our impact on the earth. In 2020 we commissioned a report to analyse our carbon footprint and used this to set ourselves a radical goal: to become the world’s first carbon neutral IT distributor by 2022. We’ve commissioned annual monitoring reports and are using the business directives from the 2015 Paris Agreement to overhaul our processes and help us reach our goal. Practically, this means changing our ERP system and moving to the cloud, cutting down business travel, encouraging working from home to reduce employee travel and choosing electrical-based heating for our offices, over gas options. This is by no means a finite list; we know we need to be continually searching for new, sustainable ways of doing things as part of our commitment to the earth and to each other.

A great deal of our sustainability inspiration also comes from our vendor partners. A large number of our vendors have developed the tech solutions that many will rely on to similarly reduce their carbon footprint. For example, our vendor IGEL produces fanless desktop terminals, without hard drives, that can run on very low power and replace hefty desktop PCs and laptops. Citrix provides their 100 million users worldwide with flexible work solutions to help businesses manage the shift to remote working, reducing employee commutes and corporate office energy use in the process. These energy reductions may seem small, but their collective effect is massive and should not be ignored.

Coronavirus has been devastating but it’s also shown us how much is possible through working collaboratively and how quickly we can adapt our behaviour to help protect others. The climate crisis is no different, even though the challenge is much bigger. We can still slow down global warming, but we’ll need urgency, accountability and sustained commitment to achieve it. And each one of us must play our part.