Thierry Van Landegem
Chairman, GreenTouch
Vice President, Global Operations, Bell Labs

Global Green Speak

August 26, 2013

Summer is nearing its end and hopefully you all enjoyed well-deserved vacations. GreenTouch didn’t stop for that matter –we were present in several events in the course of June and July, and in August we finalized preparations for GreenTouch events taking placing this fall.

In June we organized a successful session during the Sustainable Energy Week in Brussels, a full week facilitated by the European Commission focused on sustainability. Our session brought together various stakeholders of the ICT sector, and an interesting keynote by Edit Herczog, treasurer of the European Parliament. She encouraged our endeavors and opened a discussion on funding avenues for boosting further research in multi-stakeholder and industry driven initiatives as ours. Be sure that we will work this further.

GreenTouch was also invited to participate in two other high profile events: one organized by BT and the Climate Group, and one facilitated by CNBC and Shell. The key message in both events was the idea and the action to bring together stakeholders in the sector both upstream and downstream – in BT’s case this involved not only suppliers of their ICT infrastructure, but also their customers, consumers and enterprises. CNBC brought together actors in various sectors of society to assess the impact of changing technologies and behaviors on energy. The ‘fil rouge’ in all of this is the acknowledgement that one single party can’t do it all: one needs to bring together various stakeholders, look at societal impact and the regulatory framework – yes, exactly what GreenTouch does. It is not a pure technology or financial play– it is much broader.

In the meantime, we are steaming full speed ahead:  we are co-organizing a green session in the flagship TIA conference in Washington D.C., a GreenTouch event in the European green capital Nantes, France, and our member meeting in Paris. In addition, our participation is requested in high-profile events such as the Green Growth Forum and The World Economic Forum Expert Group. All of these are reflections of the great work that is happening in our consortium. I know that our newly re-elected work group and committee leaders are working hard to bring our results to the next level.

Full speed ahead!

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