“The first step is for every company to take its own responsibility seriously”, says Nokia's CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. “At Nokia we are taking action across our business to reduce emissions, reducing the energy consumption of our products and operations, and setting ourselves a goal to cut emissions from our own facilities by a minimum of 18 percent by 2010.”

Kallasvuo also pointed out that over the last decade Nokia has reduced the stand-by power of our chargers by up to 95 percent giving owners the opportunity to take action even further by unplugging their charger once their phones are charged to amplify the energy savings even greater.

“It always amazes me how small; everyday things can make a huge impact if enough of us do them. Take the mobile phone, something that over 4 billion people around the world owns today…If just a quarter of people owning mobiles did this it would save enough energy to power at least 100,000 European homes a year,” he said.

All businesses have a critical role to play, but maybe none as important as the ICT industry, he pointed out. Today the ICT industry consumes around 2 percent of the world's energy consumption, a figure expected to double by 2020, yet most of the technologies needed to dramatically reduce our energy use already exist and by using the technologies produced by the ICT industry it can enable other industries to reduce their emissions by as much as 15 percent, saving nearly 600 billion euros within this time frame.

Kallasvuo is perceptive to understand that the potential savings Nokia and its consumer can contribute if everyone plays their part. If just 10 percent of the people using Nokia devices made slight changes to their weekly technology habits over 170 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.

Clearly, using information technology and communication can make a real difference in solving the problem of global warming and climate control. Many of the technologies required are available today as Nokia's CEO has pointed out and others can be developed if the right incentives are put in place by our respective governments.

The policies are relatively clear, the costs of transition are manageable, but the one thing that is no longer negotiable is our time.