Sustainability

Insights from Atos

The most often used definition of sustainability comes from the UN World Commission on Environment and Development: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and urgent because, despite making progress in areas such as clean water, sanitation, clean energy and forest management, the world is still living unsustainably, and biodiversity and climate change have continued to deteriorate.¹

Technology has a key role to play in addressing the sustainability challenges and in meeting the goals. Therefore, sustainability has and will gain an even more prominent place in ITEA (and the Eureka Clusters) in the near future. Smart energy, for example, is the new key challenge that has recently been added to ITEA’s main challenges and it immediately was picked up by the ITEA Community during the Online ITEA PO Days 2021. Several other initiatives are in preparation.

It is important that industry, as a major consumer and polluter but also as a powerful game-changer, takes the lead in making the world more sustainable. Indeed, many companies already started along this path quite some time ago. We are proud that in this ITEA Magazine, Alexandra Knupe, Group Head for Corporate Social Responsibility at Atos, ITEA Board member, shares her views and takes us along their path.

‘Raison d’être’ of Atos

“At Atos, we are fully aware of our responsibility towards society at large and have been making our contribution, in particular in the fight against climate change for many years. In this respect, we follow the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) principles. “We started our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) journey 10 years ago. Today we lead our sector in Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) relevance. Atos is constantly rated by leading CSR ratings agencies, e.g. in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index in 2020, as one of the best CSR performing companies in its sector.

“Decarbonisation is one of our integral objectives and tied into our ‘purpose’ (or ‘raison d’être’) at Atos, which is to help design the future of the information space and enable our customers, employees and members of societies at large to live, work and develop sustainably, in a safe and secure information space. Today it is essential, mandatory even, for every business to commit to non-financial reporting on sustainability (Corporate Social Responsibility) KPIs. Fundamental business decisions are based on sustainable objectives and the reported results of a company – any stakeholder looking to buy, partner, work or invest in Atos bases their decisions on this sustainable performance. Atos’ clients also have sustainability goals and, like Atos, are facing increasingly ambitious requirements, especially in the fight against climate change. Atos supports them in achieving these targets and offers consulting and solutions to reduce their carbon footprint with the help of digital technologies.

“It is therefore important that Atos leads by example, and we show this through our ambition to reach ‘net zero’ by 2028: to reduce the global carbon emissions under our control and influence by 50% by 2025 and to offset all of Atos’s residual emissions by 2028.”

ITEA innovations for sustainability

In the views shared by Alexandra Knupe, technology is mentioned as an important enabler. For example, Digital/Virtual Twins and Smart engineering can increase efficiency and reduce a company’s carbon footprint. Within ITEA, these are important research topics since many years. Software solutions can contribute, among other things, to the optimisation of renewable energy production, the accurate prediction of energy production and consumption, the real-time balance between energy supply and demand and the management of new charging or storage solutions.

Several ITEA projects have already addressed sustainability issues and you can find a few examples below.

SPEAR - Smart Prognosis of Energy with Allocation of Resources

SPEAR aims to combine real-world production processes with Digital Twins in a simulation environment in order to accurately measure and optimise energy usage. Through its open approach to its optimisation platforms and algorithms, the project aims for uptake by companies of all sizes and a corresponding rise in the use of renewable energy in production plants.

SEAS – Smart Energy Award System

Starting in 2014, the objective of the SEAS project was to enable energy, ICT and automation systems to collaborate at consumption sites, and to introduce dynamic and refined ICT-based solutions to control, monitor and estimate energy consumption. The SEAS revolution is more cost-effective, more green-friendly and more customer focused with streamlined electrical production and consumption...everywhere.

M2MGrids - M2M Internet for dynamic M2M Information Business ecosystem

The project M2MGrids focused on developing enablers to create a dynamic cyber-physical information business ecosystem that connects the physical world with the business processes of companies in real-time. A platform was developed to support an energy flexibility service for balancing the power level and reduction of the peak loads in the distribution grid.

ENERFICIENCY - User Led Energy Efficiency Management workflows

Back in 2011, the ENERFICIENCY project set about developing a comprehensive, flexible and configurable open software platform able to analyse and respond to user needs in managing energy demands and consumption. This way, the huge investments that were being made on the energy supply side could be matched by improvements on the demand side in the efficiency of energy consumption.

ITEA 4 the future

We are very excited to see what comes out of the current ITEA Call where we see an uptake of projects addressing sustainability issues. Moreover, the new initiatives that will start in the near future will also support important innovative solutions that are needed to achieve the proposed sustainability goals and to offer the new generations a good world to live in. All good reasons for the ITEA Community to prepare ambitious research projects targeting sustainable development!