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Innovation Sustainability

Earth Day 2021

Innovation can restore our planet. This is the second part of the headline of a piece on forbes.com. And it triggered something in me. Innovation – naturally, and restoring the planet. Great. What a promise.

This year’s Earth Day theme is restoration. We need to reverse the detrimental effects of climate change and stop the pollution of our eco-system to preserve our planet for future generations.

I fully back this statement.

But we need to do more. We need long-term solutions that go beyond disaster recovery and fixing environmental emergencies. We need a shift towards a more sustainable business model to move from recovery to prevention. Our health depends on our planet’s health.

Nicely put. From recovery to prevention.

Then the piece continues to bring forward the current Covid-19 pandemic. Of course. Again, an argument that I do not want to contradict.

So far so good. But what is the innovative solution to all the mess we are in? There it gets strange at first sight and obvious once I looked more closely. The solution is to put your business in the cloud.

What? Yes. Put it in the cloud.

Companies can reduce carbon emissions with a cloud-first approach or by migrating to the cloud.

Maybe. But is this the most promising approach? I don’t know. Let’s make a quick check. The piece claims that moving to the cloud industry can save 59 million tons of CO2 emissions. Globally, we have fossil fuel and industry emissions of 36 billion tons CO2 emissions (Statista). So the cloud can saves us 0.16 percent of the annual emissions. Not so impressing, I would say.

This focus on the cloud made me think and look a little more closely. Who has done this piece? It’s by Peter Pluim, a Brand Contributor for SAP Brandvoice – a paid program. So what I am ranting about in the paragraph above is clever SAP PR in disguise of a Forbes article. It is naturally interest-driven and – in terms of impact – rather not worth mentioning.

The only good thing here might be that I learned to look more closely where what I read comes from. Lesson learned in terms of media competency.