Dialing Up Efforts to Save the Planet

A guestcommentary by Harvey Dzodin, Senior Fellow of the Center for China & Globalization

I’ve been a technology geek for more than 60 years, having received my first amateur radio license in 1959. Of course, that was like the Dark Ages in terms of the state of technology which has steadily increased its velocity of innovation to warp speed. As a former Vice President of ABC-TV I’m a veteran of the Consumer Electronics Show, now CES, that has entranced me with electronic bells and whistles for over three decades. So when I got the chance to attend the storied Mobile World Congress 2022 (MWC) for the first time, it was a revelation. Even though it was about 5G mobile technology and beyond, for me it was a 2G event: gigantic and green.

The venue, Barcelona’s Fira Gran Via exhibition center, was humongous. At nearly 200,000 square meters, walking from the main entrance to GWC’s far reaches took at least 20 minutes, even though on-site attendance was about 60% of the usual 100,000+ due to Covid-19. 

MWC was quite a contrast to a similar but much smaller event I attended in Shanghai fifteen years ago. At that time, when mobile devices were far from smart, the Luddite in me seriously questioned whether billions of people would indeed be watching big movies on a small screen or spending hours glued to their devices as the presenters there had said. Since then, the state of technology has advanced so rapidly that their prediction has long been surpassed.

If truth be told, at MWC because of is vastness and the diversity of its 1,500 exhibitors, I suffered from such an embarrassment of riches that I developed a severe case of sensory overload and MEGO—My Eyes Glazed Over. However, amidst all the buzz, it was obvious that this is a pro-social industry at the center of social change that’s intent on tackling some of our most complex challenges.

MWC is organized by the Global System for Mobile Communications (GMSA), the trade association that represents mobile operators and related organizations across the vast mobile ecosystem. In the MWC opening session GMSA put forward a new social contract to address existential global challenges.

The 2022 GMSA president, Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete, CEO of global mobile operator Telefonica, said “if we do it right, the digital revolution will bring social progress, because the digital world must be a better world, with people and values at the center”. Indeed, this corporate social responsibility commitment was very much in evidence at MWC, most especially with its focus on environmental issues, a leading global existential threat. And this commitment couldn’t have come a nano-second too soon.

On the very day MWC 2022 opened, the usually cool-as-a-cucumber, buttoned down United Nations top diplomat, Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the world is “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe”. This, as the Covid-19 pandemic, Ukraine war and a lack of political will, stymied global efforts to sufficiently reduce global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2030, the most critical goal of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. 

Echoing the dire conclusions of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a day earlier, the S-G warned that ‘the 1.5-degree goal is on life support. It is in intensive care.” So too is the very future of life on this planet as we’ve known it.

As one might expect, many MWC exhibitors called attention to the environmental challenge. A few of them even went well beyond Marketing Department greenwashing, and clearly stood above the rest in terms of their commitment to the environment.

In the U.S., AT&T and Verizon are working to meet their goal of neutral across their entire operations by 2035. Last year, Verizon launched a $1 billion green bond, funds from which will go to support its sustainability efforts.

T-Mobile had set a goal of using 100% renewable energy by the end of last year, and the company has already reported that it had essentially met that goal. Additionally, T-Mobile is in the process of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 95%. 

Equipment recycling was a hot topic at MWC. I’ll never forget the shocking photographs I saw years ago by the artist Xing Danwen in her 2002-2003 “disCONNEXION” series of the overflowing electronic waste dumps In South China villages. For the last decade, however, the growing trend has been to reduce waste where possible by a combination of recirculating reconditioned phones to new users and at the same time recapturing rare earths and not-so-rare non-biodegradable plastics and instead of putting them in landfills, repurposing them in new phones and other equipment. 

According to one study, 11% of global smartphone sales are of reconditioned equipment and the percentage is growing. Star actors are Netherlands-based Fairphone, whose phones its maker says are the world’s most repairable, and ReCommerce who sell a wide range of “pre-owned” items from clothing to reconditioned smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. Major players like Samsung and Apple are also entering this space by both establishing their own recycling plants and increasing their share of recycled products.

But the greenest company I observed was one that nearly everybody knows now, not only for its proven leadership in 5G technology, but also for being smeared by unproven allegations of so-called “back doors” supposedly allowing the Chinese government to intercept communications using their equipment. The problem is that there is no proof whatsoever of this specious allegation, and even Britain’s famed MI-5 intelligence agency could find no evidence of backdoors after a thorough investigation. 

What is proven, however, is Huawei’s front door leadership in corporate social responsibility in general and in environmental leadership more specifically. Huawei was a huge presence in MWC’s massive Hall 1 at Fira’s front door. While other companies were mostly focused on announcing new products and services, Huawei was more focused on its green credentials by “lighting up the green future”.

Huawei obviously anticipated Secretary-General Guterres’ and the IPCC’s dire warnings, Huawei went all-in on doing its fair share to help the ICT sector achieve carbon neutrality. Huawei had already committed to make its products 2.7 times more energy efficient by breakthrough enhancements in areas like theories, materials, and algorithms. For example, Huawei’s third-generation Massive MIMO products now fully utilize multi-antenna technology that improves energy efficiency by almost one-third, compared with competing products.

Huawei pioneered a unified carbon emission indicator system for the entire ICT sector as a necessary tool for reducing carbon emissions, while at the same time supporting increased data throughput. They call this “more bits, less watts”. Huawei has also introduced the Green Development Solution to help mobile operators reduce their carbon footprints. 

These efforts are the opposite of greenwashing. In 2020, CDP, a global environmental non-profit organization scored more than 5,800 companies’ efforts combatting climate change, Huawei was one of the few to receive an “A” for reducing carbon emissions, climate risks, while at the same time growing a low-carbon economy.

Judges at MWC’s annual Global Mobile Awards, or GLOMO’s apparently agree. Either solely or with partners, Huawei won GLOMO’s for best mobile network infrastructure, for 5G industry partnership, for best mobile innovation for the connected human, and for best mobile innovation for climate action.

Sadly, despite these notable green bright spots, it’s going to be impossible to completely reverse some damage to the environment. Thanks, however, to efforts of trade associations like GMSA, and the companies highlighted here, the battle is not over and much of our precious environment can still be saved. For the sake of our children and our planet, we must support them and follow their lead.



About Harvey Dzodin:
After a distinguished career in the US government and American media Dr. Harvey Dzodin is now a Beijing-based freelance columnist for several media outlets. While living in Beijing, he has published over 200 columns with an emphasis on arts, culture and the Belt & Road initiative. He is also a sought-after speaker and advisor in China and abroad. He currently serves as Nonresident Research Fellow of the think tank Center for China and Globalization and Senior Advisor of Tsinghua University National Image Research Center specializing in city branding. Dr. Dzodin was a political appointee of President Jimmy Carter and served as lawyer to a presidential commission. Upon the nomination of the White House and the US State Department he served at the United Nations Office in Vienna, Austria. He was Director and Vice President of the ABC Television in New York for more than two decades.