The Resilient Pathways report is part of ITU’s efforts to deepen multi-stakeholder collaboration and foster innovative responses to the challenges posed by climate change. It responds to an increasing interest within the international community on the significant potential of ICTs as part of climate change strategies, and aims at stimulating the exchange of experiences in this field.
A new report from ITU titled, “Resilient Pathways: The adaptation of the ICT sector to climate change” finds that built-in ICT resilience is needed to face climate changes.
The report recommends that positioning climate change in the sector’s agenda requires the active engagement of stakeholders at all levels, fostering the adoption of innovative measures to better cope with, respond and adjust to change.
In this report, ITU provides some concrete guidelines for industry on how to incorporate some of those principles into the development of new technology. It recommends a number of adaptive actions based on the principle of resilience.
The “resilient pathways” highlighted in this report constitute desirable routes of action amidst an increasingly interdependent and changing international environment. These pathways can allow the ICT sector to go beyond short-term reactive measures, in order to improve its overall adaptability to future unforeseen effects, while approaching adaptation from a collaborative, multi-level perspective.
Commenting on ITU’s mission on climate resilient innovation in ICT, ITU secretary-general Hamadoun I. Touré said, “Mainstreaming climate-resilient innovation in research and development needs to become a priority. We need to foster a new, more flexible mindset and new learning processes to take into account robustness in the face of climate change impact when designing these fundamental technologies.”
According to Luis Neves, Group Sustainability and Climate Change officer, Deutsche Telekom, the ICT industry is a powerful force in terms of adapting to climate change. For this reason, the industry must generate new solutions with resilience in mind.
Some of the recommendations in the report include the need for improvements in telecommunication service coverage, particularly in locations vulnerable to climate change impacts; development of new work to strengthen the resilience of ICT infrastructure.
The report also highlights the Nairobi Work Programme on impacts, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change (NWP), of which ITU is a partner.
Other recommendations include the implementation of novel approaches to improve systems’ diversity and interoperability, including virtualization, server networks and system backup, in order to ensure intra-sector redundancy, and thus the continuity of services and operations during climatic disturbances.