Nokia announces long-term plan to combat climate change
Nokia, again, instigates its long-term plan to halve its carbon emission from 2019 to 2030. This is following the announcement of Ethisphere Institute, naming the Finnish corporation as the most Ethical company in the world in its fourth consecutive year.
Nokia is one of the many companies in the world that continues to raise awareness of climate change and has since committed its business in trying many different ways to lessen its overall carbon footprint. Whether you believe it or not, climate change is posing a real threat to the future of humanity, and all of the Earthian ecologies in general.
Scientists believe that the warming of our planet by 1.5°C will result in irreversible effects, leading up to endless biological disasters affecting our health, human security, livelihoods, food security, water supply, and impede economic growth. One of the many disturbing effects of this 1.5°C scenario is ocean acidification.
Ocean acidification will initiate the extinction of many marine animals like oysters, crabs, and corals which need calcium carbonate, a key building block in seawater, to form their protective shells. This will start a chain effect in marine ecology, resulting in major biological chaos.
If left unresolved, we may see the effects of climate change as early as 2023, with global temperature projected to reach 2°C. This is an even worse situation, affecting the ice reservoir in Antarctica, effectively erasing many major cities on the map as a result.
In this new report, Nokia announced its continued support to Science Based Targets (SBTs) in reducing its overall carbon emission by 50% all across its operations and products in use by 2030. This target is in line with SBTs’ 1.5°C warming scenario and will have a huge impact to reverse the warming situation before it even gets worse.
“We have led the way in reducing emissions from our own operations and helping our customers to do the same by continuously innovating to make our products more energy-efficient in recent years,” said Pekka Lundmark, President, and CEO for Nokia, in the press release.
“But climate change is a race against time. These tougher, new, scientifically-calibrated climate targets mean we will go further and faster to reduce our carbon footprint and ensure sustainability is at the heart of our product design and the smart solutions we enable.”
Nokia is able to reach this target by making sure that all their products, may it be hardware or software, is designed to run efficiently, utilizing only a fraction of energy used by its previous designs.
The following are the results:
- Nokia’s ReefShark chipset used in AirScale radio products cuts energy use by up to 66%.
- The company was the first to deliver a liquid-cooled 5G base station into commercial operation, which can reduce the energy consumption of the base station cooling system by 90%, and CO2 emissions of the AirScale radio products by 80% including optional waste-heat re-use.
- Its Compact Active Antenna enables the use of far fewer materials than any other legacy macro product.
- The Nokia AVA Energy Efficiency service can reduce energy use by 20% through cloud-based Artificial Intelligence that powers down parts of the radio network when traffic levels are low.
Of course, this should be a collective effort of many big companies in the world, and not just Nokia. But Nokia’s initiative should be able to set a new industry trend, which many companies will surely aim to follow. We heard that former Microsoft CEO, Bill Gates, has also dedicated lots of efforts to help combat climate change. Apple Inc. is also one of the most vocal companies in the world in regards to climate change, promising a reduced carbon footprint for all its products.
