Our visit to COP27 was packed with various activities as we shared our visions and solutions towards more sustainable future. Iskraemeco was invited to the pavilion of our parent company Elsewedy Electric, gave two presentations and participated in a conference as part of the Slovenian Day.
Green digital solutions
Conference attendees had the opportunity to discover Iskraemeco’s intelligent solutions. Energy and water, driven by digitalization, play a key role in building a greener infrastructure and our presentations’ aim was to raise awareness on the importance of digital tools. Cutting-edge solutions enable the optimization of grids while contributing to energy efficiency and decarbonization.
Our role in reducing the CO2 emissions
If we want to accelerate decarbonization, we all have a role to play – that was one of the key messages of the presentation ‘How might digital platform Green Penguin help cities on their decarbonization journey by empowering kids first’. With more than 70% of CO2 emissions coming from cities, we need to get a grip on growing urbanization and the high energy demand that comes with it. These challenges are addressed by the Green Penguin Project, which aims to raise awareness of individuals’ impact on the environment and their role in sustainable development. It gives them insights and supports them to adopt and employ new, more sustainable habits and behaviors.
Sustainable innovations
To make the sustainable future our reality, we need to take innovative approaches. We had the opportunity to share our vision at the conference ‘Digital Innovations for a Green Transformation’, organized as part of the Slovenian Days at COP27. Together with other speakers from Slovenian companies and organizations, we welcomed the audience at the Metaverse MetaCOP on the platform Distriverse, which was for the first time in the history of the UN climate conferences.
About COP27
This year’s conference focused on the severity of the global climate challenge and the need for bold and swift collective action:
- The Egyptian Presidency’s vision is to move from planning to implementation – words must be followed by action.
- Across the globe, millions of people are suffering the consequences of increasingly frequent extreme weather events. The climate crisis will exacerbate economic, social and environmental threats – our response must be focused on creating a resilient planet.
- Collective action and collaborative efforts are key if we are to secure a sustainable future for all.
Short interview with Iskraemeco’s representative at COP27
We had a chance to catch our colleague Sergej Zavrnik during his trip to Egypt and he has shared some inspiring insights with us.
Sergej, to attend such a huge and important international event must make for quite an experience. What are your impressions?
Indeed! This global event brought together all key sustainability-related stakeholders in one place, to discuss, decide and act together upon sustainability questions. And I have been impressed by the diversity of nations and cultures coming from private and public sector to present their environmental and social challenges, as well as solutions. What was also exciting to see is that the messages of the climate challenges and solutions weren’t conveyed only through presentations, panels and meetings, but also by means of cultural activities and performances, such as small concerts during the event, art exhibitions, public talks, dance events among other.
This really conveys the message on how everyone and everything have to be connected in order to tackle the climate change. What are some of the key takeaways you would like to share?
I will try to summarize them in three points:
- To be able to change and mitigate environmental as well as social risks, we need to create incentives for all stakeholders in the system – governments, economy, financial institutions, representatives of society, environment and others.
- Active dialog between government, enterprises and society should be established, in order to align governmental’ strategic sustainability goals with enterprise’ innovations and social’ needs.
- Last but not least, sustainability and its related questions cannot be defined solely by numbers but should be addressed using narratives from all around the world. Understanding other cultures, natural environments as well as business ecosystems, could improve the quality of innovations answering the questions of sustainability and climate change.
Thanks for this recap. One last question – this year’s conference focused heavily on the importance of acceleration of our actions to fight the climate change. What kind of role can project like Green Penguin play in making this a reality?
That’s a great question. As presented at COP27 and already addressed earlier, we as a society, governmental actors and enterprises need to change our perspectives and behaviors to decrease the negative impact on the environment. In that context, the Green Penguin digital platform contributes to this goal by increasing awareness, leveling up the knowledge and enabling us to change our habits, focusing on the kids first with our Green Penguin mobile app in development. By connecting energy and resource consumption data with the user behavior data, we will create an engaging user experience for kids and give them contextualized knowledge and activities to decrease energy and resource consumption. A mobile app for kids will be the first digital solution in the Green Penguin digital platform, which will be followed by the development of digital applications for households, industry and businesses, as well as public institutions.
The digital platform, covering and supporting all stakeholders in the urban environments, will enable the mapping of end-user behaviors and sharing end-user insights with governments, energy and resource sector, all with an aim to adapt current policies, create new innovations and change their operations to fit the end-user demands and needs.
