Global challenges around resource scarcity, environmental sustainability, and economic growth are driving the need for new paradigms. Thanks to unprecedented data capture and analytics capabilities, organizations can now optimize systems and operations to reduce costs and environmental impacts. Examples highlighted include a shipping firm reducing emissions and costs through logistics optimization, a utility deploying smart meters to enable consumer energy savings, and a university developing tools to optimize building energy use through big data analytics. A smarter planet approach utilizing real-time data and analytics can help reconcile demands for sustainability, growth, and affordability.

1. Building a Smarter Planet: 5 in a Series
The new face of sustainability on a smarter planet.
Faced with the seemingly irreconcilable demands of environmental energy usage and calculate CO2 reductions. By decreasing carbon
stewardship and reviving the world’s economy, many are asking if emissions by more than 2,000 metric tons and cutting IT energy
it is even possible to live today without borrowing from tomorrow. costs by more than 30%, they will save nearly $500,000 annually.
Globalization, population growth, rapid urbanization and a growing
Consider CenterPoint Energy in Texas, building an intelligent utility
middle class are all driving competition for increasingly scarce
network that detects outages and instruments homes with smart
resources—energy, water and raw materials.
meters—allowing homeowners to make smarter consumption
And yet, from the perspective of a smarter planet, this traditional decisions. CenterPoint has already installed more than 618,000
opposition between nature and industry is not inevitable. It is smart meters for residential and business consumers in Houston.
being replaced by a very different paradigm, grounded in a new
understanding of sustainability that is operational and economical, And consider the City University of New York, which is collaborating
as well as environmentally sound. with IBM Research to develop a comprehensive analytic tool set for
assessing, tracking, forecasting, simulating and optimizing energy
The key lies in the data. Thanks to pervasive instrumentation and consumption based on the large data sets of buildings in an urban
global interconnection, we are now capturing it in unprecedented
environment. The hoped-for results will be better decision making,
volume and variety. The world’s network traffic will soon total more
significant energy savings, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and
than half a zettabyte (that’s a 1 followed by 21 zeros). And thanks
lower costs.
to powerful new computing systems and advanced analytics, we
can now make sense of it in real time. The importance of these kinds of smarter, whole-system approaches
is underlined in the Climate Group’s SMART 2020 report, which
Forward-thinking leaders around the world are harnessing and
estimates that improvement in energy efficiency and reduction of
analyzing these data flows to create end-to-end, sustainable
infrastructures—enabling people, buildings, campuses and entire greenhouse gas emissions can potentially drive $1 trillion in savings
cities to interact in new ways. In the process, they are changing per year by 2020 and 7.8 gigatons of CO2 abatement globally.
operational behavior to sustain growth, while reaping economic We are learning that in today’s globally integrated economy, we
benefits and achieving measurable environmental results. cannot optimize any one of these systems without optimizing all of
Consider COSCO, a global shipping firm in China, which reduced them. And thanks to the capabilities of a smarter planet, we can.
its distribution centers from 100 to 40, thereby lowering its logistics Where once we inferred, now we can know. We can do so in the
costs by 23% and reducing its CO2 emissions by 15%, all while systems that humans control—and we can even do so in how those
maintaining service levels for clients. systems interact with the planetary ecosystem we share.
Consider the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Let’s build a smarter planet. Join us and see what others are doing
Affairs, which has deployed statistical modeling to determine at ibm.com/smarterplanet
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