Hugues Ferreboeuf
Leader of the Lean ICT Project
The Shift Project
Hugues Ferreboeuf has spent most of his professional career in the information technology sector,including 20 years in senior management positions. He has worked in various environments,such as large companies, high-growth companies and government agencies and has also been an entrepreneur, having created 3 companies. He is a graduate of ́Ecole Polytechnique and TelecomParisTech. He has chosen to use his experience to advise companies and public bodies on how to transform themselves in order to deal with the current digital, energy and societal transitions. He is a partner in Virtus Management and has also joined the think tank The Shift Project since the end of 2016 where he has been leading the Lean ICT project (or how to make the digital transition environmentally friendly).
Talk
The current trend of digital consumption in the world is unsustainable in terms of the supply of energy and materials it requires. Although technical progress has been driving high energy efficiency gains, the digital carbon footprint is now increasing at 8% a year because the digital ”volumes” grow exponentially. As there will not be any technological breakthrough industrialized in the next 10 years, we will need to make the digital ecosystem become more sober so that digital energy consumption does not keep going up. This is mandatory if we want Digital to contribute positively to the goal of dividing by 2 in the next 10 years the global GHG emissions,in itself a prerequisite to limit global warming to 2◦C. Implementing this digital sobriety principle calls for a holistic approach encompassing consumers, enterprises, digital vendors and regulators,in order to bring forward a systemic shift.