Private sector's climate involvement is achieving "escape velocity", the speed needed to break free of a planet's gravity
Andy Yinan Hu, Director of Corporate Communications at Huawei, notes the escalating involvement of private companies in COP28 and their dignificant potential in green technology.
On Dec. 21, 2023, the Center for China & Globalization (CCG) Thought Corner, co-organized by the Global Young Leaders Dialogue Program (GYLD) and Global Shapers Community Beijing II Hub, explored the accomplishments thus far, especially after COP28, and the unmet challenges in climate change governance, action and resilience.
On Monday, Dec. 25, we published the transcript of the keynote speech by Ma Jun 马军, Founder of the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) on his takeways from the recent COP28 in Dubai, UAE.
Dr. Ma's speech was followed by another keynote speech by Andy Yinan Hu 胡亦南, Director of Corporate Communications at Huawei, and a panel discussion, both moderated by CCG Research Fellow Zoon Ahmed.
The following is the transcript of Mr. Hu's speech and his answers to several questions from the audience. The transcript of the panel discussion will be published later on CCG Update.
Mr. Hu's keynote emphasized the heightened involvement of private companies, including Huawei, in COP28 and in broader climate change discussions. "The momentum had achieved some sort of escape velocity," he said. While recognizing that private sector involvement is often profit-driven and rooted in sound business rationale, he is convinced that private enterprises can be effectively incentivized to embrace sustainable practices. He also underscores the potential for private enterprises to make a more profound commitment to environmental responsibility beyond simply promoting specific products.
Andy Yinan Hu
Director of Corporate Communications at Huawei
Thank you. Thank you, Zoon. This is a humbling experience. I'm honored to be one of the two corporate voices tonight and to be sharing after Dr. Ma's keynote. Zoon has heard a variation of my sharing about two weeks ago. So to do her justice and then to do you all justice, I think would be best, given the nature of this being a thought corner, I think it probably be best if I spoke less on our green cases per se and more on the metaphysical, the why and the what.
So, the fundamentals of why we're here are actually why we were there and why did it matter. So three things I would like to talk about in the time that I have:
Why we're there at COP and as a business.
Why did it matter?
What did we talk about?
So, fundamentals, what do companies generally get out of COP? COP is the conference, of course, and the companies are not a party at the table. But given that, in the past few COPs, private sector has, you've seen an increasing role of the private sector. And Dr. Ma commented on this moments ago on how the COP28 presidency has placed the private industry front and center—so much so to the point that companies are considered at to some level to be able to support the policy push to phase out fossil fuels.
Personally, I think that's a stretch. But it is valid to say that if we want to move the climate talks beyond meeting rooms, then the business sector has to be involved.
The question then becomes how, right? For me, I think the corporate sector, businesses are at COP to do three things and they're listed right here. That's the basic rationale for any company to be there to.
Stimulate green innovation policy.
Showcase their own green credentials.
Engage in green conversations with their peers and counterparts.
For us, Huawei, our engagement at COP cuts across all three. We have been running point on the last two COPs in Sharm el-Sheikh and in Dubai. And I wanna start at the bottom here with the green conversations because given the nature of the private industry, I think one of the points that has to be made is: a clear business case has to be made for any company to be involved at COP, especially at a platform where essentially we're having multi-stakeholder, multilateral discussions on the government level, and the corporate sector has very little stake in the discussions themselves, in the outcomes.
So if you wanna meet your business partners, your business counterparts and do deals at COP, then the logic that follows is that they have to be there in first place. Right? So are they? they are.
To use Huawei as an example. Our revenue in 2022 was 642 billion yuan. For those of you who know about us, we have three primary target groups: the Carrier Network Business Group, the Enterprise Business Group, and the Consumer Business Group. In terms of industry, we break it down to a handful and digital power is a new and rising star in that mix. Those two — carriers and digital power — make up about just a little, just about 40% of our revenue last year.
And some of our most important partners, as you see, are there. I've only listed three but you get the idea. The MTN is, of course, based in Africa and the e& (formerly Etisalat) is based in the Middle East. There's Masdar at the bottom there whose founder Dr. Sultan, whom Dr. Ma Jun also talked about in his keynote. So for a customer-entric company like Huawei, there is sound enough an impetus for its business teams to be involved with or without the petty sidekicks like ourselves.
So beyond your day-to-day business, there is another facet for Huawei's involvement. Huawei's has been a big player in international standards. We work with about 800 of these on a global scale, we have contributed 123,000 standards worldwide. Here I've listed some of the biggest international organizations in this field. So at the center you have the ITU, which is the International Telecommunication Union. That is the UN specialized agency for information and telecommunication technologies. So basically they are the bread and butter.
A couple of things, a couple of trends at the ITU since about 2022. They have a new leadership as of this year, January 1st.
They have been working to spur industry alignment and build sustainability into the fabric of technical standards.
They're doing this increasingly with other standard setting bodies on the global stage.
So for us, I think, then the question is very simple. Well, it is not so much a question really; we have to be there, we have to be on the same boat because it wouldn't make a good business sense if new standards are popping up — they are being discussed, positioned, and created, and we were not at the table.
So we had a head start. Those two in the green are some of the head start at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh. About a few weeks before COP27 the ITU republished the Network Carbon Intensity Energy (NCIe) standard which essentially measures the greenness of a network. And a few weeks after that they published another standard which measures the extent to which Information and communications technology (ICT) industry can help enable the green development of other industries. We're an important contributor to both of these standards which, in fact, correspond to our two central green propositions which I will come to later.
And this year marks the first time the ITU, the ISO (International Standardization Organization), the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) came together to highlight the role of international standardization in achieving positive environmental effects or results. The outcome is exactly that: a joint document on how sustainability will be built into technical standards development by design.
So "Green by Design"— this is something that's been in discussion for a long time. I know it's still, at this stage, as Dr. Ma rightfully pointed out, on paper, but it's there. And so given this context, the answer to the first two questions i.e. why we need to be at COP as a business and why it matters would be, I think, self-evident.
The chart here provides a rough idea of the evolution of our participation at COP. Essentially an executive from Huawei was invited to speak virtually in Glasgow — that was the one green thing you see there — that's an online participation, virtual participation by one of our executives. What happened right afterwards is, after that, I reached out to the people who made the invitation — the UN Climate Change Global Innovation Hub, who have since become our primary partner in the two COPs that followed.
So last year we tried to test the waters a bit in Egypt. We had 17 people in physical attendance, most of them the people that you see here the 17 were actually observers. So we tried to put together an event in the Blue Zone with our primary partner and we were invited to speak at two separate occasions, one in the Blue and the other in the Green.
But this year, and this is also in line with what Dr. Ma observed, there's this huge boost in the participation of the private sector from China and, I think, on a global scale as well. And for us, at least, we sort of took off. We have our own exhibit space — a small one in the Green Zone. We had seven events in the Blue Zone, five in the Green. It designed and coordinated our event with climate change and series of other events with the ITU. Four of their five top elected officials were there in Dubai for COP for the first time ever. So, they didn't know what to do or expect out of it. Nor did they know how to do things at COP — because it involved a few other UN specialized agencies — any more than we did. So, it was a fun few months of discussion, negotiation and if I may say so, recalibration.
To me, I think by this COP, and this is something that Dr. Ma also addressed, not for Huawei but for the corporate scene in general, the momentum had achieved some sort of escape velocity. So, it became exponential because the applications and solutions, which is also another buzzword of the presidency and of Dr. Ma's speech just now, had gained sufficient momentum, I think. And there was an overwhelming diffusion of technology that is involved in green development. And of course, there was now enough understanding in the private sector of COP and its value. So it was those few factors together.
With that, we're down to the last question, which is what we talked about: there were two things that we made very clear from the outset.
The first is on a platform like this, what you're essentially sharing is a vision, not a product catalog. If your vision is sound enough, your credentials are sound enough, then your product will sell itself, but it probably shouldn't be selling itself on a platform like this. And then if you engage with the right people, of course, then the rest would be like that.
So it's about a vision. It's about a vision that you articulate well. It's about a vision that you can filter down. That's the first thing.
The Second thing is that vision cannot be a solo act. It has to be an orchestration of partners, competitors, both within your own field and beyond your own field of expertise. If there is one place for an act of unity, it would, with actionable outcomes, of course, be at COP.
So we are an ICT company essentially. We thrive on computation and connectivity. Our overall vision is to bring digital to every person, home and community, etc. But the green vision, we tried a little word play on the letters "I-C-T" to reflect in my view a vision, which we hold to be self-evident, which I think our partners would endorse and concur with. It simply says “Innovate, Collaborate, Transform.” It applies that very simply: we need lots of partners to come up with transformative solutions on the common path to build green. That's the vision.
Now onto how this translates into what we do in green and there essentially three layers. This is essentially for us, for others and for the world. I won't probably have time to go through them all.
So what does it mean we may talk about green in the context of say, a mobile network? When you browse the internet on your phone, data is transmitted. Now when that happens you consume energy. The more you do that, the more energy you would consume. By one estimate for every year and the next 10 years, the data demand for mobile networks is gonna grow at 50%. So 50% more data every year for the next 10 years. And the question then becomes: how do we transmit as much information and as much data as possible with the least amount of energy? And that's how you green a network.
Now we use AI and big data to collect it from the networks to optimize and cut energy consumption, power consumption for the networks. That particular innovation we have been implementing in 40 countries worldwide and it saved 700,000 tonnes of carbon emissions per year. That's the first little bubble that you see on the left there, which explains essentially how we green ICT itself.
The second slightly larger bubble. We enable other industries on their own course of green development. We call this the enabling effect of ICT. And by 2030, it's estimated that ICT contribute can contribute to emissions cuts in other industries worldwide 10 times more than the emissions generated by ICT itself. There are many examples, one perhaps more proved example and relevant example of this is in one of the large language models (LLMs) that we developed on a weather forecast. It's called by many names. In China, we call it Pangu 盘古. And overseas we're gonna have a another name. But it uses AI uses machine learning data line analytics to come up with much faster and more accurate predictions, and this would drop on wind speed, sea level pressure, other major features, weather forecast. So that's the second layer which we've come to call "ICT for Green" or the carbon footprint methodology.
The third and final layer — I'll actually try to skip. It focuses on innovation for green outside the traditional realms of ICT, i.e. on digital power and beyond.
Those are the key outcomes for us out of this COP I think one thing here to note is they're by no means altruistic. So I think that logic sort of underlies corporate involvement in business engagement ad COP. But the idea I think you walk away with is how companies would reinvent themselves on the path to green with incredible agility. And I think in some way, in some sense, we're a fine example of that. If it truly is the beginning of the end like the joint document out from the COP28 presidency has said or has indicated, then the feasible pathways that on this course which Dr. Ma just talked about, will definitely also bring forth incredible opportunities to be tapped as well.
Q1:
I saw in one of your slides that your company's participation in COP grew quite a lot relative to previous COPs. Do you think that this was partially because the UAE hosted the summit and that it is a country that has good relations with China? Has that been a factor encouraging more cooperation?
Andy Yinan Hu:
Well, let's just say it's not Chinese dynamics per se with the UAE government, but more of our business teams. It's a sizable market region-wise for our business. So, in that sense, yes. And also for the North Africa business, it seems. Last year in Egypt was also an incredible opportunities to be tapped.
But then we're trying to navigate on how to take part in a platform like this, which at the time seemed a little premature. But this year we sort of caught on to the many opportunities that were there. And then at the same time, like I said, there are many major partners of ours which were also major sponsors of the event or they contributed or participated significantly to the event. So those two things.
Q2:
This is Trevor from the Foreign Environmental Cooperation Center of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) of China.
I think your presentation has been really enlightening and inspiring, showing how private sectors can contribute to COP, or in general climate change and environmental issues, etc. So I didn't bring this question here today, but I was really inspired by your speech. I just want to know, Huawei is a giant company and we all know that. But in the whole work range, I was very curious how can maybe middle-sized companies or micro-sized companies can contribute to climate change and maybe have a voice heard at the COP. I know you don't speak for those companies, but I've been really curious.
Andy Yinan Hu:
Well, I think we learned a lot from the small-and-medium-sized companies (SMEs) and their participation at COP in the first place. That's how we sort of made the pitch internally before way before last call. We had to do comparative studies, not just on how other major players in the ICT world, but also how other Chinese businesses and how other European businesses are taking part in COP.
The study that we did last year, and I think one of the things they did directly resulted in the decision to participate at COP. And it was because there was so much contribution that these SMEs were doing at different COPs that we decided: "why not have it go?" Because it's actually harder for a big company like Huawei to be at a platform like this without knowing how others do.
Q3:
I'm Alexandre from France. Actually, I graduated in IT and I'm interested in the algorithms you said about green networks. Basically, the networks competition has always been to be the first test until the 5G. And now we have reached some numbers that, for personal individuals, it needs not reach to be higher. It's already as fast as we know.
So when did you decide to actually make greener networks? And from your side, from Huawei, do you think you're one of the biggest leaders in this technology? Because AI is going up a lot, of course. So, what about the Huawei place in this?
Andy Yinan Hu:
I wouldn't say if we're a leader in AI, in green networks, but we're one of the companies that have put in a lot of effort in experimenting green networks and green sites because Huawei is also heavily invested in data centers worldwide.
Most of those trial sites have started, I think past two or three years. So it's an effort that also coincided with our increasing participation at COP. So with that solid growing of business performance internally, and with that gradually increasing proportion of the business toward green, you would then try to pivot your corporate decision makers to have an increasing role at places like COP, which would otherwise seem, "oh,why are we there? It's the United Nations," right?
It's my job to engage with you and this specialized agency. So, we'll have to come up with a business case and with a justifiable cause to participate. And I think the slides, the deck that I showed, hopefully exemplifies that. So there is the business case wherein our major partners are there, and they have their own solutions, they have their own credentials to be displayed, they have their own vision that they would like to proceed with the partners. And on the other hand, you have the standards of which we're a sizable part or one way or another. And if you're being left out of these forward-leaning discussions at a platform like this, either at a public meeting or in closed-door discussions, then it's a scenario that you would want to avoid as a big company.
Q4:
We all know that experts tell us that technology is key to advancing adaptation and mitigation to climate change, particularly in the developing or poor countries. I speak for Africa in this context. So, what are you doing? And since you attended COP28, other companies, what are they also doing to ensure that developing and poor countries get the right technology that they need to adapt and mitigate climate change? Thank you.
Andy Yinan Hu:
Thank you. That's an essential question we've been asking for the last two COPs. Our primary partner at UN climate change, one of the major concerns, or the objective they have is to respond to core human needs in different markets. The situation in Sierra Leone, in Tanzania is gonna be necessarily different from that of the UAE or Egypt, Morocco, or if you're looking at this side of the world in Singapore, Malaysia, we have policies active in 170+ markets worldwide. So we do have different solutions that are tailored to different markets.
And as I said, we've just picked up, I think, we're trying to pick up momentum in trying to design particular, specific, market-oriented solutions. So one of the things that we do, as I'm sure you know, we work with mobile operators to build base stations to provide that last mile of connectivity to rural communities in Africa, of all places.
We've been in Africa since 2001 — we’ve been active in 57 countries. Last year, I think, right after Sharm el-Sheikh, after COP 27, we were still experimenting how to change the fabric, the material that we used to build a data center. Because if you're gonna build a data center that is costly, that is heavy, that requires a truck on a slippery, muddy road and lousy transportation to get to the communities you want, then no operator would do that. So, we're trying with a lot more lightweight material that is a lot more portable and can be carried by one person to provide that last mile connectivity and this is something we're experimenting in Egypt, Morocco, I hope we'll soon be able to bring that to other parts of Africa. That's just one example. Thank you.
The panel discussion, which followed Ma Jun's and Andy Yinan Hu's keynote speeches, will be published later on CCG Update.