New Networks Will Help Build a More Sustainable World

Thoughts about technology that is inclusive, trusted, and creates a more sustainable world

These posts represent my personal views on the future of the digital economy powered by the cloud and artificial intelligence. Unless otherwise indicated, they do not represent the official views of Microsoft.

In recent weeks I’ve been writing about how the coronavirus pandemic has made having a good Internet connection more important than ever. The unfortunate reality is that millions of people around the world, especially in rural areas, still don’t have one. This is true not only in sub-Saharan Africa, but even in the United States and Europe, the world’s wealthiest regions. Policymakers who fail to prioritize this most basic means of participating in modern economic and social life endanger their nations’ prosperity now and in the future.

This week I want to look at the question of Internet connectivity from a different angle. Specifically, I want to ask what benefits wider Internet access and more modern network infrastructures can bring for our shared global environment.

There is of course an immediate and paradoxical observation to be made: the coronavirus pandemic has caused a massive worldwide drop in air pollution. All over the world scientists have measured large declines in the most noxious pollutants, including NO2, CO2, and PM2.5 particles. In the first four months of 2020 global CO2 emissions dropped by more than one billion tons compared to the same period in 2019. As of this past April, daily global CO2 emissions had dropped by nearly 20%.

In a real sense, the pandemic has offered us an unexpected glimpse into what the future might look like if we can develop modes of economic growth that protect and preserve our planet’s natural environments. As the former chair of the UK government’s science advisory committee on air quality puts it:

“We are now, inadvertently, conducting the largest-scale experiment [in pollution control] ever seen. Are we looking at what we might see in the future if we can move to a low-carbon economy? Not to denigrate the loss of life, but this might give us some hope from something terrible… to see what can be achieved.”

The following four charts provide striking visual evidence of the pandemic’s positive impact on global air quality.

Daily global CO2 emissions in millions of metric tons. Source: Nature

Declining air pollution in China. Source: NASA

Declining air pollution in Northern Italy. Source: European Space Agency

Declining air pollution in the United States. Source: Descartes Labs

But we know that much of the drop in emissions will not last. As people go back to work and the world’s industries crank up again, pollution levels will inevitably begin to rise. How quickly they return remains to be seen. In 2008 the global financial crisis caused a 1.5% drop in CO2 emissions, but by 2009 we were back to business as usual with a 5% rise in emissions. Nevertheless, there is a good case to be made that this time will be different. I firmly believe that the digital transformation of society, business, and government can make the world cleaner and greener. There are many reasons to believe this is so.

One obvious reason is that there will be more work from home and thus less commuting. It’s clear that once the pandemic is behind us a certain percentage of people who have been working from home will not be returning to their offices. Many large employers have announced that they will permanently increase the share of their workforces allowed or even positively encouraged to work from home. This is likely good news for the economy. These companies are motivated by the demonstrable gains in employee satisfaction and efficiency, but also by the prospect of lower real estate costs. An influential study by Stanford economist Nick Bloom found that carefully managed work-from-home programs can substantially boost employee productivity. At this point, no one really knows how many people will still be working from home a year or two from now. But credible estimates suggest that 25–30% of the US workforce will be working from home at least several days per week by the end of 2021.

A lasting increase in work from home as a result of habits developed during the pandemic will certainly have a positive impact on the environment. But even before the pandemic struck, digital transformation was already laying the groundwork for a sustained decrease in energy use and harmful emissions. Here are a few examples:

• Smart urban transportation grids. Researchers have found that when smart algorithms control traffic signals and coordinate the behavior of self-driving cars, the result is a dramatic reduction in energy-wasting, pollution-causing traffic blockages. Even when all cars are electric it will never be a good thing to allow their motors to idle in stopped or slow-moving traffic. Implementing this kind of smart transportation grid will require that every vehicle on the road has an always-on, low-latency network connection, and that means 5G.
• Smart buildings. University of Pennsylvania researchers report that buildings account for 42% of the world’s energy use. There are very large energy gains to be made from managing buildings and their complicated internal systems more efficiently. Here again, fast real-time networks enabled by 5G will be essential ingredients in the solution.
• The Internet of Things. Taking an even broader view, it is apparent that the more of our civilization’s infrastructure we can instrument in order to measure and control its activity in real time, the less pollution we will create and the less energy we will waste. There are many examples of this beyond those we have mentioned: power generation and distribution, airline traffic control, mining and industrial waste, even sewage control.
• Smart agriculture. The world’s farms consume large amounts of energy and natural resources such as water, and they also emit considerable quantities of greenhouse gas. For example, rice farming consumes about 40% of all the irrigation water used in the world and produces about 1.5% of total greenhouse gases in the form of methane. These numbers can be reduced by fine-grained control of water pumps that turn the pumps on or off based on real-time conditions. Similar efficiencies can be won by real-time intelligent monitoring and control in many other kinds of farming. These solutions all depend on reliable and affordable wireless network connectivity to the fields.

As many readers may recall, Microsoft made a promise earlier this year to become carbon negative by 2030 and to remove all of its historical emissions from the atmosphere by 2050. I can tell you that Microsoft employees take this commitment very seriously. We know that we all live on the same planet. Digital transformation writ large is an opportunity to remake not just our economies but the environmental foundations of human civilization. Let’s not miss this chance.