By Edoardo Gai, Head of Sustainability Services, RobecoSAM

We are excited about the publication of the 10^th year anniversary edition of the Sustainability Yearbook. Each year, we highlight the results of our in-depth analysis of the sustainability performance over 2,000 companies worldwide. The analysis focuses on industry-specific factors that we believe are important to long-term value creation and is based on up to 120 financially material economic, environmental, social and governance criteria.

In addition, our analysis frequently incorporates newly arising sustainability factors that are likely to gain importance and have an impact on companies’ ability to generate value. For instance, this year we focused our attention on the sustainable management of supply chains and integrated reporting.

As part of our commitment to continuously enhancing our methodology, over the last two years we have devoted considerable effort towards understanding and defining the most important issues that companies must consider if they wish to mitigate the risks in their supply chain. Equally important, is the companies’ ability to capture opportunities linked to closer cooperation with their suppliers. In order to provide transparency on our methodology, and in the hopes of initiating a dialogue among our stakeholders, we have shared some of our insights from our evaluation of companies’ supply chain management in this year’s Sustainability Yearbook. Read More…

By Thierry E. Klein, Head of Green Research at Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent

On January 16^th, representatives from companies and universities from across the state gathered at the Bell Labs headquarters in Murray Hill, NJ for the first New Jersey Green ICT Summit. Organized in collaboration with Verizon (check out their blog post) and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA), the event was intended to bring together participants in the varied and increasingly rich community of companies and researchers throughout the state that are contributing to the greening of the information and communications technology (ICT) industry.

Why? Green and sustainable communication and computing are increasingly important to the ICT industry, and are quickly becoming key growth drivers for 21^st century economies. Here at Bell Labs we have of course long recognized the importance of, and associated business opportunities offered by the greening of ICT. In keeping with that realization, we have made energy efficiency a key attribute of our innovation programs. More and more organizations in the ICT industry are making the same decisions – including a large and growing number right here in New Jersey.

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By Isabelle Autissier, President of WWF France.

In fall 2012, we held our 6^th Green Forum, which focused on the highly relevant subject, “A green path of growth for the European economy?”.

This opportunity for high-level discussion and sharing was only possible thanks to the support and participation of Alcatel-Lucent. We are grateful for their support. These discussions are summarized on the event website.

The Green Forum event represents the WWF’s values of dialog and action.

Through the activities carried out in over 100 countries and the active support of its 5.8 million members worldwide, WWF is working to slow down damage to the environment and to build a future where man can live in harmony with nature. Our change theory is based on the necessity of uniting all of the players in society through dialog and action.

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By Thierry Van Landegem, Chairman, GreenTouch, and VP Global Operations, Bell Labs

Happy New Green Year to you!  Yes, a Green Year. I am confident that the progress and success we achieved in GreenTouch in 2012 will provide a solid basis for many more great green achievements in 2013.

GreenTouch was announced with great expectations and a very ambitious goal in 2010. We are now two and a half years into this journey. We started off 2012 with a second critical milestone of the consortium: we demonstrated the breakthrough Bi-PON technology that dramatically improves energy efficiency in fiber to the home (FTTH) networks (see this press release with video).  This demo attracted many interviews with major trade journalists and analysts, and generated numerous positive reactions.

What most tend to forget, however, is that this demo should be seen as one element of the technology roadmap we are building. We publically released our initial Strategic Research Areas and Project Portfolio document, which highlights the major research activities and projects, and brings attention to promising critical research areas that require further in-depth investigation.  This document is a precursor of a comprehensive GreenTouch roadmap that will comprise a network reference architecture, the portfolio of research projects and activities, the end-to-end network architecture and a progress measurement towards improving the network energy efficiency by a factor 1000 compared to 2010.

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By Katrina Destree Cochran (@KatrinaDestree), Director Stakeholder Engagement & Sustainability and Tom Okrasinski, Senior Manager, Bell Labs CTO Environmental Engineering

Earlier this week, one of our leading trade associations — the Global eSustainability Initiative (GeSI) — officially launched its second major report that the ICT industry has used as its key reference that illustrates the sector’s critical role in combating climate change.

“GeSI SMARTer 2020: The Role of ICT in Driving a Sustainable Future” is an industry-wide report examining how ICT-enabled solutions offer the potential to reduce GHG emissions by 16.5% by 2020.  Launched at the UN Climate Change Conferences COP-18 in Qatar, Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres has endorsed the report.

Alcatel-Lucent was one of the most active contributors to the report, supplying telecom traffic data, life cycle GHG emissions data, methodology and communications expertise.  We wholly endorse the report’s underlying premise that ICT is a powerful tool available to all industry sectors as they tackle the challenge of reducing their impact on the environment.

Some of the report’s highlights include:

• An enabling policy environment is required to realize the potential for ICT to reduce GHG emissions by 9.1 GtCO2e by 2020
• Employing ICT to make better use of energy and fuel could result in savings estimated at USD$1.9 trillion
• Progress made by GreenTouch™ in green research

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