U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addressed Nepal’s parliament on 30th Oct. 2023 after flying past Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak. “Glaciers are melting at records. I was a witness,” Guterres said in his address. “Mountainsides exposed, inflaming the risk of rockslides, landslides and avalanche”, Guterres’s this quotation indicated that the world should witness the situation of Nepal in the climate change and global warming impact.
Because of its socioeconomic effects, one of the most interesting areas of empirical research in recent decades has been climate change. A crucial component of the international response to climate change is education. Education about climate change enables youth to recognize and respond to the effects of global warming. In civilizations that are still growing economically, these effects are particularly severe for vulnerable groups. Although climate change is a worldwide phenomenon, its effects are primarily felt locally.
The ability to gather and analyze environmental data that may cover the entire terrestrial system, from the bottom of the ocean to the uppermost regions of the atmosphere, is made possible by information and communication technologies (ICT). They allow us to control our energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, in addition to evaluating the effects of humans on the environment. ICTs are therefore a crucial component in campaigns to stop and lessen the effects of climate change.
ICT helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions from all other industrial sectors by a significant amount, despite their own contribution to emissions. Additionally, attempts are being undertaken to lessen the carbon impact of IT hardware. Additionally, less power is used by next-generation networks (NGN), particularly those built on optical fiber.
Nepal has to take into consideration the risk of biological invasions brought on by climate change into new regions, especially in the Himalayas. According to research, using the results of the Global Circulation Model, Nepal's average temperature is expected to rise by 0.5°C to 2.0°C by the 2030s and by 3.0°C to 6.3°C by the 2090s.
Research by S. Sharma shows that an annual maximum temperature increases of 0.056°C has been experienced in Nepal. This leads to effect in pandemic. The nation's first case of dengue fever was documented on May 13, 2019, in the Sunsari district in the east, while the second case was recorded on July 27, 2019, in Makwanpur, southwest of Kathmandu.
Nepal’s Mountains, Hills, and the Terai are examples of the natural diversity that contributes to the difference in the influence of climate change. A sensible strategy would be to evaluate the effects of climate change according to ecoregion. In comparison to other locations, the temperature is trending upward more quickly in the mountains. It is evident that there will be problems in achieving the sustainable development goal (SDG) by 2030 that are related to climate change.
“ICT is a driver to minimize climate change and global warming effects in Nepal”. Telecommunications are vital in responding to natural disasters that climate change may bring. Monitoring vulnerable or dangerous environments is possible with sensor networks. Satellite observations provide essential data on weather and vegetation patterns. More lives will be saved after a disaster if humanitarian organizations on the ground can get Internet and phone connections more quickly.
The root points to be considered to reduce carbon footprint emission is the energy saving for which we need to focus on green ICT and the earliest migration to latest generation networking. Green ICT means to reduce the impact of ICT on the environment. The way of reducing the energy consumption by the ICT equipment and also the reduction on CO2 emission by properly managing the ICT equipment life cycle is the part of green ICT.
Using
green technologies produce low levels of CO2 emissions and hence, it
helps to reduce CO2 emissions in other areas. For example, research
estimated that tele-computing and virtual meetings have the potential to reduce
68MtCO2 by 2030. The major motivation behind green ICT is to reduce
energy consumption and CO2 emission in the delivery networks,
minimize operational sustainability in wireless networks, service provider
operational cost optimization and quality of service improvement within the
available resource limits.
Major
Drivers of Energy Saving and CO2 Emissions Reductions
Migration
to Latest Generation Networking
It is anticipated that switching to next generation network (NGN) will result into a 30–40% decrease in power usage when compared to the existing public switched telephone network. This is particularly true for voice services, where capacity requirements can be reduced by up to 70%.
Several studies have been carried out for the energy aware routing scheme to minimize the energy consumption and carbon footprint reduction of network equipment and their link utilization to verify that latest networking technologies such as Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) and the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) have greater flexibility towards green networking.
In the legacy system, many organizations World-wide maintained their networking infrastructure (servers, routers, switches, and computers) in their own organizational premises. This scenario exists more in case of developing countries like Nepal. Due to the emergence of cloud computing, the network infrastructures are migrating to internet data centers. It is estimated that moving the legacy infrastructure into cloud data centers would reduce CO2 emission by 40% and energy saving up to 15%.
The
broad choice among the technologies and networks available will enable the most
efficient, early and economically viable implementation of sustainable
development goals (SDG). Greening of network is to be considered from the
techno-economic and managerial perspectives.
Network
Function and Server Virtualization
Network
function and server virtualization helps reduce the energy consumption in a
network. The software and network operations previously run in the separate
commodity hardware are moved and re-located to a single hardware with
virtualization technologies. It means number of computers are integrated or
re-located into a single computer leading to energy optimization and
operations.
Network
Resource Optimization
Resource
monitoring and its optimum utilization according to traffic condition has
leading role in the reduction of energy usage and carbon footprint. NGN is
flexible and programmable so that intelligent traffic analysis and bandwidth
monitoring help maintain the quality of service and proper resource utilization.
Optimum Radio Frequency Planning
Wireless
base stations are the most energy hungry network components. Research indicates
that radio access network consumes almost 80% of total power in cellular
networks. Focusing to sparsely disperse rural population, virtual coverage
implementation for example, use of openBTS and openCellular technologies would
be more energy efficient and cost effective for the telecom operators.
Proper
Placement of Network Devices
Suitable
placement of network devices can help to save significant amount of energy
consumption. This helps to avoid the
need of bigger number of skilled human resources to reside in the rural zone
for the network operations and management. A more secure infrastructure can be
established by placing the controllers in the managed network center, which can
be easily accessible and can control the rural data plane networks from the
remote.
Energy
Efficient Network Deployment
In
the context of Nepal, Internet service providers expand their network
considering their business opportunities. The increase in OpEX in terms of
increased annual energy bills can be reduced, if focusing on the green ICT. ITU-T
Recommendation G.993.2 incorporates multiple power modes for very high-speed
digital subscriber line broadband access.
Encourage to Renewable Energy Technology
Wind,
water, solar and the warmth in the earth are the major renewable resources that
can supply our needs in a sustainable way. Regarding the rural Nepal, situation
of power provisioning, installation and operation of micro-hydro power plants
are increasing. The excess power from micro-hydro is to be planned to supply to
national grid.
Smart Power Tracking and Automatic Switchover
Flexibility
in network operation and programmability adds significant contributions to
implement smart grid and automatic switchover of the system according to
traffic load condition. Latest network enables for efficient monitoring of
energy usage by the ICT equipment and automatic switchover of the system
according to energy status.
Energy Management System (EMS)
Generally
EMS is a system of computer added tools used by service providers to monitor,
control and optimize the performance of electrical generation system.
ISP/Telcos operators could apply centralized energy and carbon emission
monitoring system under the framework of EMS.
Traffic Optimization, Management and Monitoring
Monitoring
of energy consumption by network equipment helps for the better understanding
to manage and find the best strategy to adopt in order to maximize reduction of
unnecessary usage of electricity.
Energy Benchmarking for Energy Consumption
Energy
audit is the part of energy management system. Benchmarking or auditing of
network operations and services help to identifying and quantifying cost-effective energy saving and reporting opportunities for the service providers.
In the context of Nepal, regulators can apply energy audit policy at least once
in a year to the ICT industries and identify the environmental impact of ICT
via energy use and CO2 emission.
Government Plan and Policies
Most
of the opinions of service providers of Nepal reflect to the lack of
government’s proper policy, guidelines and subsidy plan to promote ICT and
green networking at Nepal. Strategies have not yet been incorporated on all the
ICT policies promulgated till date. The country lies between two big, industrialized countries: China and India, where the Himalayan belt of Nepal
acts like GHG sinking zone impacting more on the climate change. Considering
the climate change effect and increasing demands of energy with rapid increase
of internet users, green ICT with carbon trading strategies should be the
government focus so that ICT could be the tool for energy optimization and
reduction of GHGs. State should timely address the pace of global technological
change via policy initiatives and create suitable environment to adapt new technologies.
Digital Literacy and Skill Development
It is increasingly urgent that communities possess the capacity to respond to climate change, now and in the future. Community representations of climate-relevant issues are critical to underpinning responses.
ICTs are also essential for
increasing public knowledge of climate change and digital skill to tackle it,
teaching people and trained them with full of skill about how to lessen its
consequences, and developing the human capital is necessary to adapt to those
effects. The ICT as a tool for digital skill development is becoming more and
more significant in education and training programs to develop digitally aware
smart society.
The goal is to generate a critical mass of knowledgeable individuals who can safeguard the environment, particularly in developing nations that are frequently most at risk from the consequences of climate change. We can use ICT to respond to the issues posed by climate change while simultaneously working toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals, this form of capacity development is essential.
Conclusion
Nepal, being a mountainous country
has to seriously take necessary action in time to reduce carbon footprint emissions
and reduce climate change impact. Effective implementation of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change provisions can help to minimize
the current effects.