The IT sector accounts for 2% of global emissions – the same as the airline industry.

When you consider the ever-increasing demands of modern businesses to handle more and more data, and the digitisation of processes – all while integrating nascent technologies such as genAI – this is only likely to increase.

Beyond this, there’s the very concerning issue of e-waste, which, according the UN-commissioned E-waste Moniter has seen a 21% increase over the past five years, amounting to 57 million tonnes a year.

In the opening keynote of DIGIT’s inaugural ESG Innovation Summit, Natalie Pullin, CTO head of sustainability at HSBC, discussed how we can use technology to help maximise positives and minimise negatives.

Deconstructing sustainability

Before we can really assess tech’s impact on sustainability, it’s important to understand the breadth of concern—which the term recognises—and to make a clear separation between sustainability and ESG.

In Pullin’s words, sustainability asks the question: “How can we satisfy the needs of today without negatively impacting the people of the future; it’s that question that really separates sustainability from ESG as the former encompasses so much more.

“Sustainability is multi-factorial, and that’s where technology can help.”

Broadening out, Pullin then discussed the forces that are really driving sustainability in business:

“The big one is regulation,” said Pullin.

She adds: “There’s a huge amount of regulation coming out of reporting bodies, things like Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) that businesses are having to acquiesce to.”

Beyond what businesses are becoming ever more obligated to engage with, the other huge driving forces in sustainability are consumers and resilience, the latter in particular being something that inherently relates to technological concerns.

“Resilience means lots of different things in the technology world,” said Pullin.

This can refer to infrastructure that’s always ‘on’ with regards to how that translates to services and maintaining functionality.

Other measures of resilience through the lens of technology are security and the physical components we use to underpin the services businesses provide, even if it’s far removed.

On this, Pullin said: “Things like the cables we use have international supply chains. Those things are made in countries which are much more exposed to the risks of climate change, so there’s potential for supply chain issues.”

With that in mind, resilience is about making sure that our businesses are going to be future-proofed.

Using data to maximise sustainability

According to Pullin, we need to get to a point where “people, planet and profit are considered in equal measure when we make our decisions.”

What we need to accommodate this is data.

“We understand profit and loss,” said Pullin. “We don’t understand how to bring in those sustainability metrics.”

This is where Pullin sees an opportunity to solve through digitalisation.

She said: “Digital transformation and sustainability transformation are inextricably linked.

“Through automation, through AI, through digital processes, there’s lots of opportunities to solve some of the biggest challenges.”

Pullin uses disclosure as an example. Whether you have to do it at a corporate level or as a part of your IT function, there’s a lot of disparate data sets in different types of file format.

“How do you bring that all together and make sense of it?” Pullin posited.

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“If you do it manually, it’s almost impossible when you consider the number of metrics that you’ll want to include – you need technology to support you.”

More broadly, Pullin evangelises a holistic approach for digital transformation that, yes, considers the cost and operational efficiency benefits, but also looks at areas of automation and digitisation that can bolster sustainability efforts.

When you consider some of the sobering statistics that Pullin presents, it’s important to consider the imperative of long-term sustainability beyond reportage at the end of the next quarter.

“45% of the world’s population is not yet on the internet. When they inevitably are, that means more hardware, software and more energy – data centres could take up to 8-10% of the world’s energy use.

Between this and things and e-waste – which is a “massive problem” – there’s a role “we need to play in the technology function of any organisation.”