Scientific methodology for Telecom services energy consumption and CO2 emission assessment including negative and positive impacts

The France Telecom operator is highly involved in environmental preservation and part of it, is the scientific studies of ICT impacts associated with an active contribution to standardization bodies, observatories, groups, fora and initiatives such as ETSI and ITU-T. This paper describes France Telecom and university common research work in this field and how it can help standardization works. All these methods will help to determine holistic negative impact of ICT, but also the positive impact by dematerialization in a realistic way. Then it is possible to calculate the balance and the so-wished gain by using ICT. The paper will also compare the different Key Performance Indicators that can be calculated by using the impact results such as ICT power consumption reduction, ICT gain on other sectors, ICT contribution to the effort on global consumption and CO2 reduction targets. Finally, the paper should not be complete without indicating some new paradoxes that need much more studies: intensity decrease may hide an absolute value increase, manufacturing optimization and green label may increase the global consumption, the sustainable development level can limit the absolute reduction.