The global footprint of mobile communications: The ecological and economic perspective

This article quantifies the global carbon footprint of mobile communication systems, and discusses its ecological and economic implications. Using up-to-date data and life cycle assessment models, we predict an increase of CO2 equivalent emissions by a factor of three until 2020 compared to 2007, rising from about 86 to 235 Mto CO 2 e, suggesting a steeper increase than predicted in the well-known SMART2020 report. We provide a breakdown of the global carbon footprint, which reveals that production of mobile devices and global radio access network operation will remain the major contributors, accompanied by an increasing share of emissions due to data transfer in the backbone resulting from rising mobile…