Barriers specific to the ICT sector Sample Clauses

Barriers specific to the ICT sector. Besides the barriers identified before, specific barriers to the ICT sector were equally identified: • Lack of knowledge on ICT environmental impacts; • Lack of reliability and availability of data used, due to the complexity of ICT equipment and services as well as confidentiality issues relating to ICT data; • Lack of reliability of results. The lack of knowledge on ICT environmental impacts is among the identified barriers – specific to the ICT sector – to the implementation of methodologies by organisations and local authorities. This is first due to a common emphasis on how ICT can reduce environmental impacts from other sectors (“ICT for green”) rather than on the impacts of the ICT sector itself (“green ICT”). In addition, the perception of impacts from the ICT sector is not always in accordance with the reality. The indirect (or “hidden”) nature of most ICT environmental impacts makes it difficult to apprehend: while the energy required for the networks operations (e.g. data exchange and storage) of a smartphone is significant, the user may focus only on the energy consumed by its phone. Indeed, in the digital world, we deal with flows of information, which have less material or obvious impacts than the material flows of the standard economy. Similarly, people perceive the impacts from the use phase more easily than the impacts from other stages, for instance when the sustainable procurement policy of an organisation focuses on the energy efficiency of IT equipment without accounting for product longevity extension or end-of-life management. Finally, there is a lack of awareness on impact categories other than energy consumption and climate change, since most assessments focus on these two environmental impacts. The question of responsibility of organisations and local authorities towards the environment is particularly complex in the ICT sector, considering its dematerialised and diluted nature. Increasing general knowledge on environmental impacts – in particular indirect – from ICT goods and services, and providing users with best practices could be a first step before implementing a methodology to quantitatively assess the impacts of an ICT product or organisation. The success stories collected in the scope of XXXXXXXXXXXX.xx aim at providing examples of environmental impacts and how they can be reduced thanks to the implementation of sustainable practices and relevant methodologies. Another barrier is the lack of reliability and availability o...