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Some speeches emphasizing his concerns about climate, development, and other issues.
 GLOBAL ALLIANCE FOR ICT & DEVELOPMENT
REGIONAL SEMINAR ON ICT & EDUCATION
Havana, Cuba
9 February 2009
It’s a great pleasure to be with you here in Havana this morning.
I have always been a firm supporter of the Global Alliance for ICT and Development, and am pleased to see ICTs in education on the agenda. This is one of the most vital issues we face today.
Education is not just the bridge between today’s generation and the next, but the only sure way to guarantee a positive future for all of our children.
Cuba has long been aware of this, and is renowned for the successful efforts it has put into education in even the most difficult of times.
In the twenty first century, ICTs have a vital part to play in education – both in terms of making education itself more effective, and in ensuring that today’s young people can play a full and equitable role in the world of tomorrow.
ICTs are the great enabler and transformer of modern society, helping people communicate across distance and across cultural divides, facilitating trade, and providing access to vital resources – especially in health and education.
Indeed, the vital role of ICTs in education was recognized by world leaders in the World Summit on the Information Society who agreed to achieve the following targets by 2015:
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to connect universities, colleges, secondary schools and primary schools to ICTs and
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to adapt all primary and secondary school curricula to meet the challenges of the Information Society, taking into account national circumstances.
Leaders participating in WSIS agreed to a host of other WSIS connectivity targets: to connect villages, libraries, cultural centers and to ensure that more than half of the world’s population has access to ICTs within their reach.
Ladies and gentlemen, great progress has been made on some of these targets. The number of mobile cellular subscribers globally has just passed the four billion mark.
And well over one and a half billion people now have access to the Internet.
This makes ICT a significant sector in its own right, typically accounting for around 5% of global GDP and an even higher proportion of GDP growth – in addition to its important facilitating role in other sectors.
My friends,
As many of you will know, the ITU is the UN specialized agency responsible for ICTs, and its mission is to ‘Connect the World’ and ensure that all people, wherever they live, have access to the vast range of benefits ICTs can offer.
Among its many key ICT-related activities, ITU is the world’s leading source of impartial, up-to-date statistics and analysis on ICT infrastructure and services. We proactively track market developments across every economy worldwide, measuring the key indicators that quantify local access to services like fixed and mobile telephony, Internet and broadband.
How much progress has been made in recent years, particularly in the group of the 49 UN-designated Least Developed Countries who need ICTs the most?
I am happy to be able to say that it has been a miraculous millennium for most of the world’s poorest nations.
The total effective number of telephone subscribers in the LDCs as a whole has risen by more than 30-fold since the year 2000, from under 4 million to well over 120 million.
In 2001, just seven LDCs had a teledensity of 5 lines per 100 people or more; By 2007, fully 37 of them had reached or surpassed this level of penetration.
Mobile telephony has been the main driver behind this extraordinary success story. From sharing just 800,000 mobile connections between them just eight years ago, the 49 LDCs now boast over 110 million mobile subscribers, with several LDCs currently ranked among the world’s fastest-growing mobile markets.
Here in Cuba, there has been tremendous progress of late, with a combined annual growth rate in mobile subscribers of 62%, from 2002 to 2007. And I was delighted to read in the Cuba News Headlines last month that the mobile subscriber base grew to some 330,000 users by the end of last year, and was forecast by the operator to reach 1.6 million within three years.
This would give Cuba a mobile teledensity of 15%, a figure which can only be expected to rise rapidly as the technology becomes more affordable and widespread.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Locking users in developing countries out of the full online experience risks locking them out of the modern world altogether.
Which brings us back to the subject of today’s seminar: ICT and education.
Social and economic development is simply not possible without a sound educational background. And a sound educational background, in this new era we live in today, is simply not possible without ICTs.
It is therefore nothing short of our moral duty to ensure that all of the world’s children are given equal access to the full benefits of ICTs.
The time is ripe to remind national leaders of the vital WSIS targets for ICTs in education and to set in place projects and programmes to make sure they can be reached.
We have no time to lose. It is already 2009! Just six more years to go until the WSIS targets are to be met.
Are our schools connected to the Internet? Are we training students to develop ICT literacy skills and to meet the challenges of the Information Society?
Let us remember that to connect a school is to connect a community. And by connecting communities we open each smaller world to the vast opportunities of the wider world.
I encourage each and every one of us – today, and into the future – to strive for this vital common goal.
With our hard work and determination, there is no reason why today’s children should not inherit an equitable, inclusive and thriving Information Society.
That, my friends, is the challenge we face.
Thank you.
INFORMÁTICA 2009
ICT CONVERGENCE: ITU'S APPROACH TO THE CHALLENGES
Havana, Cuba
10 February 2009
In the world of ICTs, the word ‘convergence’ has been around for a long time – but frankly, until quite recently, there was very little to show for all the talk.
But now the technology has caught up with the marketing hype, and convergence suddenly seems ubiquitous – with converged devices, converged applications, and converged networks.
To give just a few examples:
- On the device side, there will be more digital cameras sold in 2009 than all the analogue cameras that were ever manufactured – and the vast majority will be incorporated in mobile phones.
- On the application side, look at standard voice telephony, which is no longer limited to copper-wire POTS networks, but carried across the Internet, along co-axial cable TV links, and over the airwaves using a range of wireless technologies.
- And concerning networks, in mature markets it is becoming almost impossible to have just a simple phone line; or an Internet connection; or simple old-fashioned television reception. Instead, these things are increasingly bundled together, their boundaries blurred.
As new technologies and platforms steadily erode the links between types of infrastructure and applications, convergence is arguably the most powerful driving force transforming today’s ICT landscape.
Like all advances, however, convergence has brought with it many new challenges, and we at ITU are working hard to face up to and address them – from standardization issues to Internet governance and policy-making, to one of the biggest problems we face today: cybersecurity.
Distinguished colleagues,
ITU is the oldest intergovernmental organization in the world. It is unique among UN agencies in having both public and private sector membership. In addition to 191 Member States, we count more than 700 Sector and Associate Members – many of them corporate rivals who put aside their competitive interests to work cooperatively with us to develop new technical standards and regulations governing the equitable use of shared ICT resources.
That gives us tremendous power to work in areas where consensus is not just desirable, but essential, and it also allows us to rise above political differences and help solve problems where they matter most, at the grassroots level.
Standardization
A good example of that is our work in the standardization activities which underpin the world’s global ICT networks.
So how do we decide and prioritize our work, in this complex global system?
There are many ways. ITU is highly flexible and will jump quickly to meet the demands of industry.
Clearly the identification of new topics is key to maintain momentum, however, and to remain at the cutting of edge of technological development.
Initiatives that focus on bringing new topics and new blood into ITU-T’s standardization work include a series of events under the ‘Kaleidoscope’ umbrella, which seeks to better engage with the academic community, and ‘Technology Watch’, an initiative to survey the ICT environment for emerging technologies and assess their standardization needs.
I would therefore like to take this opportunity to publicize the next Kaleidoscope event, which will take place in Argentina at the end of August – and which I hope will attract contributions from right across the Latin American and Caribbean region.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Before looking at ITU’s involvement in Internet-related issues, such as governance and cybersecurity, I would like to share with you a few examples of the very important work we are doing in standardization – because standards, as we all know, are at the very heart of the converged ICT industry.
Next Generation Networks
At ITU, one of our most important areas of work at the moment is in Next Generation Networks – which will be one of the key focus areas at our World Telecommunication Policy Forum taking place in April in Lisbon, Portugal.
Next Generation Network packet-switched technology is already beginning to replace the traditional circuit-switched networks that have served as the basis of telephony since its inception well over a century ago.
Today, we have the audacity to dream of achieving seamless connectivity to broadband services over any network and any device, worldwide – and we are leading the move to Next Generation Networks through our NGN Global Standards Initiative.
This is one of the largest, most ambitious and most wide-ranging standardization projects ever undertaken – with ITU-T having now approved over 60 NGN Recommendations.
Of course that means it also comes with its own special challenges. The most significant of these is regulation, with uncertainty as to whether existing mechanisms are sufficient to support a smooth migration, while at the same time ensuring continued interoperability with legacy networks.
The fully-networked home
At the global level, we have also recently completed work on a new standard for the ‘fully-networked home’. This is the first global standard offering an in-home, high-speed network capable of delivering room-to-room HDTV.
Published under the G.hn banner, the standard promises true convergence by delivering high-quality multimedia over power, coaxial, phone and other home wiring. It will give up to 20 times the throughput of existing wireless technologies and three times that of existing wired technologies.
The fully-networked car
Moving from the home to transport, ITU has also been holding annual workshops on the ‘fully-networked car’, most recently in association with the Geneva International Motor Show. A detailed report can be found online in the ITU News of April 2008 – just go to www.itu.int/itunews and look at Back Issues for more information.
Inspired by the event and with the support of new contributions at its last meeting, ITU-T Study Group 16 has started new work on a vehicle gateway protocol, which aims at defining global standards that will allow seamless integration of consumer devices with intelligent transport systems.
Video coding Emmy
Much of the work we do goes on behind the scenes, but sometimes we earn public accolades, and this was the case last August, when we were delighted to receive a prestigious Primetime Emmy Award for Excellence from the US Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
The prize was awarded to ITU, ISO and IEC for our work in producing an advanced video coding standard, formally known as Recommendation ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC Standard 14496-10 on Advanced Video Coding (AVC).
This may sound obscure, but a quick search for H.264 on Google delivers close to fourteen million hits.
And we are very pleased to see ITU-T H.264 | MPEG-4 AVC now being deployed in millions of products and services to deliver high definition video images over broadcast television, cable TV and a variety of direct-broadcast satellite-based television services – as well as Blu-Ray disc formats, mobile phones and Internet Protocol television (IPTV).
ITU-T and accessibility
Before moving beyond our work in the area of standardization, I would like to mention one more very important field where we have been devoting our efforts: making ICTs more accessible to people with disabilities.
This is one of the key obligations of the United Nations Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and ITU has been active in accessibility and human factors for many years.
This work has increased significantly since the beginning of 2008, however, and I am pleased to draw attention to three events which took place last year:
- Firstly, ITU – together with G3ict, the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs – held a joint forum in April entitled ‘The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Challenges and Opportunities for ICT Standards’;
- Secondly, ITU-T established a Joint Coordination Activity on Accessibility and Human Factors (JCA-AHF);
- And thirdly, ITU was successful in the establishing of an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability at the Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad, India, in December.
We also dedicated this year’s World Telecommunication and Information Society Day in May to connecting persons with disabilities to opportunities offered by ICTs.
The event was celebrated in Cairo, and the WTISD Award was presented to three eminent laureates there.
The Award also went to Mrs Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt's first Lady, President and Founder of the Suzanne Mubarak Women's International Peace Movement, who has been a champion of peace as well as a promoter of women's empowerment and the wellbeing of children and youth.
It was a great personal pleasure, therefore, to find out that the film of the awards ceremony in Cairo was the most-watched video in 2008 on ITU’s YouTube channel.
Excellencies, colleagues,
Moving onto Internet-related issues, it must be said that convergence has brought with it new challenges in the highly-charged area of Internet governance and public policy. This will be another of our key areas for discussion at the World Telecommunication Policy Forum in April.
Internet governance
The crux of today’s Internet governance debate centres on resource management, and in particular the management of Internet top level domains, the allocation of Internet protocol addresses, and the regulations stipulating who defines their associated rules.
With Internet demographics changing very rapidly, and developing countries grossly under-represented in current governance mechanisms, there’s an urgent need to ensure Internet governance frameworks keep pace with new realities.
As I noted at the most recent meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad, in India, at the beginning of December, heads of international agencies are unanimous in their call for global frameworks that embrace a new multilateral approach to managing global resources.
These leaders spoke of the urgent need for a new model that rewrites the rules of globalization, so that its benefits are more equitably distributed. They were unequivocal in their call for a new environment that supports, rather than undermines, social fairness and sustainable development for all.
This compelling need for new international frameworks is just as important when applied to cyberspace. The concerns of governments and policymakers around the world are real, and demand to be addressed. If we continue to sweep them under the carpet, we risk the same kind of meltdown in cyberspace as we have recently been seeing in the real world.
The same principles of democracy which are advocated by many people around the world, also need to be applied to Internet governance.
As a neutral and impartial international organization, ITU is working hard to try and achieve consensus in this sensitive domain, and to ensure that any outcomes do indeed benefit all the world’s people, and not just the wealthy few.
Cybersecurity
Any mention of the Internet would be incomplete without discussing one of today’s most pressing issues, and one of the ITU’s top priorities: cybersecurity.
Just under two years ago, after being tasked by the global community with developing an effective response to cybersecurity issues, ITU launched the Global Cybersecurity Agenda – the GCA.
As a framework for international cooperation and response, the GCA focuses on forging partnership and leveraging collaboration between all relevant parties in the fight against cybercrime.
To set priorities and develop clear strategies for a coordinated global approach, I first convened a special High Level Experts Group which brought together top-level representatives from around the world.
The group comprised cybersecurity experts from national administrations, from enforcement agencies such as Interpol, from international organizations like the United Nations and the Council of Europe, from academic and research organizations, and from the ICT industry itself.
Remarkably, this was the first time that many of these key organizations had ever collaborated – clear evidence, I think, of the very urgent need for a global approach led by a representative global organization like ITU.
Today, the GCA continues to gain momentum worldwide, with the support of global leaders including Nobel Peace Laureate Dr Óscar Arias Sánchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica, and President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso.
ITU has also signed a key Memorandum of Understanding with Malaysia’s IMPACT – the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber-Threats – that sees IMPACT’s state-of-the-art global headquarters in Cyberjaya, Kuala Lumpur, become the physical home of the GCA.
IMPACT will provide a broad portfolio of services to support the GCA. Its state-of-the-art Global Response Centre has been designed to serve as the foremost cyberthreat resource centre in the world. The Centre will provide the global community with a real-time aggregated early warning system that will help member countries quickly identify cyberthreats and provide critical guidance on effective counter measures.
It will also provide nations with a unique electronic tool that will enable authorized cyber experts in different countries to pool resources and collaborate with each other remotely and securely, to help the global community respond immediately to cyber-threats, especially during crisis situations.
In the area of capacity building, IMPACT will conduct high-level briefings for the benefit of representatives of ITU Member States, along with training and skills development delivered in collaboration with leading ICT companies and institutions.
Such high-level, cross-industry briefings represent an unprecedented opportunity for Member States to gain invaluable information and privileged private sector insight about the latest trends, threats and emerging technologies.
IMPACT’s Centre for Security Assurance & Research will work with leading ICT experts to aggregate and develop global best practice guidelines, creating international benchmarks relevant to governments around the world.
And on request, the Centre will be empowered to conduct independent ICT security audits for government agencies or critical infrastructure companies, such as national utility and telecommunication companies.
IMPACT’s Security Assurance Division will also function as an independent, internationally recognized, voluntary certification body for cybersecurity.
Finally, under ITU leadership, IMPACT’s Centre for Policy & International Cooperation will work with partners including UN agencies, Interpol, the Council of Europe, the OECD and others to formulate new policies on cybersecurity and help promote the harmonization of national laws relating to cyberthreats and cybercrime.
Child Online Protection
The GCA has also taken on a new and important responsibility, in the form of the Child Online Protection initiative, which we launched in November.
At ITU, we firmly believe that children everywhere have the right to a safe environment, even when that environment is a cyber one. Because even though the connection is virtual, the danger can be all too real.
Through the Child Online Protection initiative, ITU will therefore be working with policymakers, educators, industry, the media, NGOs – and with children themselves – to promote awareness and develop effective strategies to protect young people from cybercriminals of all kinds.
In today’s newly converged and interconnected world, we need to work together, to build multi-stakeholder consensus on effective strategies to tackle the challenges we face.
I would therefore like to see the international community join together under the auspices of the GCA to deliver a Common Code of Conduct on Cyber Crime – what I call the five ‘C’s.
Such a Code of Conduct will provide us all with a clear, legally-enforceable global framework through which we can begin to prosecute cybercriminals and stamp out their activities.
Criminals will no longer be able to hide behind legal loopholes and regulatory inconsistencies. Nations with less well-developed ICT legislation will no longer unwittingly find themselves hosting nefarious online activities. And even the world’s most disadvantaged states will at last have an effective shield with which to safeguard themselves.
ITU is uniquely well-placed to serve as the broker and coordinating agency for such a Code of Conduct. We have a long and successful history of building multi-stakeholder consensus on globally shared ICT resources. And we are a truly globally representative body whose mandate has always been based on cooperation, and on partnership.
My friends,
Convergence brings with it a wealth of opportunities – many of which we cannot even imagine yet. But it brings challenges, too, which must be faced squarely.
I do not believe that any one of us can solve these problems alone.
But I do believe we can solve them together.
INFORMÁTICA 2009
ICTs AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Havana, Cuba
11 February 2009
We are living through one of the most challenging periods in human history, faced with the prospect of irreversible global climate change.
The United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has said that 2009 is the year of climate change, and he put the issue in the clearest possible terms last month when he warned that:
“Climate change threatens all our goals for development and social progress. Indeed, it is the one true existential threat to the planet.”
Two weeks ago, Ban Ki-moon urged world leaders and top-level business executives to launch a global ‘Green New Deal’ that creates jobs and fights climate change by investing in renewable energy and technological development.
Climate change risks transforming the very face of the world we live in. At current rates of extinction, scientists predict that two-thirds of all bird, mammal, butterfly, and plant species will be extinct by the end of this century.
In Geneva, where I live, we have had an unusually cold and snow-filled winter, and the whole of last year was relatively cool compared to what we have become used to.
But 2008 was still the tenth hottest year on record, and global temperatures over the past decade were an average of 0.2 degrees warmer than the previous hottest decade – which happened to be the 1990s.
Climate change presents us with incredible challenges, including food and water security, with new forecasts suggesting that half the world’s population could face climate-induced food crisis this century.
Inevitably, most of those people will be the ones who are least well equipped to deal with such challenges – the peoples of the developing world.
If we want to ensure a safe and prosperous existence for our children and grandchildren, we must act now.
Ladies and gentlemen,
As the leader of ITU, the UN specialized agency responsible for ICTs, it is my mission to connect the world and ensure that all people, wherever they live, have access to the vast range of benefits ICTs offer.
This of course presents not just a huge development challenge, but a giant ecological challenge too. Today, the ICT sector produces some two to three per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions. But this share will inevitably rise, as we roll out more mobile and broadband networks, and as many more of the world’s people gain access to ICTs.
Fortunately there is also good news concerning ICTs and climate change.
ICTs themselves are becoming much greener, and the ICT sector has a great deal to offer in creating a cleaner, greener world. ‘Green IT’, for example, helps businesses cut both immediate and medium-term running costs – through energy-efficient technology, server virtualization and reduced travel expenses, for example.
And while ICTs may themselves be a contributor to global warming, they are also a critical tool in helping reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
By applying ICT to global infrastructure and industry, we enable significant opportunities for emission reductions, and can leverage huge cost savings. This is partly through ICTs’ unique ability to allow us to measure, optimize and manage energy consumption, and also in ICTs ability to enable intelligent transport systems, smart buildings and better supply chain management.
So the ICT industry – by helping other sectors reduce their emissions – could contribute as much as 15 per cent in global emission reductions by 2020. And if businesses around the world systematically used ICTs they could unlock global energy efficiency savings of over 500 billion Euros.
At ITU – as a responsible global international organization – we are taking climate change very seriously indeed, and are undertaking important work on how ICTs can help prevent and avert climate change.
As a first step, we ourselves aim to achieve climate neutrality for all our own operations within three years.
At a broader level, we continue to take the lead in promoting the creation of new energy-efficient devices and networks, and in developing technical standards to limit and reduce the power requirements of ICT equipment and services.
To look at just one example, we are leading the move to Next Generation Networks through our NGN Global Standards Initiative, which is one of the largest, most ambitious and most wide-ranging standardization projects ever undertaken. NGNs will do many things, but – perhaps most importantly – they will reduce power consumption by up to 40%.
Distinguished colleagues,
Another area where we believe ICTs are invaluable is in the monitoring and mitigation of natural disasters.
With an unprecedented increase in vulnerabilities – stemming from population growth, environmental degradation and, most significantly, climate change – both the frequency and the impact of disasters has dramatically increased in recent years.
In the global effort to confront this challenge, ITU is helping developing countries to build resilience through the use of ICTs at both the national and the community level.
Working together with Member States, we are designing national emergency telecommunications plans that integrate climate change adaptation into national policies, strategies, and programmes.
So while it is true that not all disasters can be prevented, their impact and all the underlying risks can nonetheless be reduced.
Among other activities, we are designing and implementing Early Warning Centres; we are deploying Geographical Information Systems for mapping specific hazards associated with climate change; we are deploying equipment for coordinating rescue operations and setting up telemedicine facilities in an effort to enhance the response capabilities of countries; and we are reconstructing telecommunication networks disrupted or destroyed by disasters.
I have also launched the ITU Framework for Cooperation in Emergencies, which has created a standby fund to finance activities aimed at mitigating the impact of disasters and which provides a platform for multi-stakeholder, multi-sectoral partnerships.
ITU, in collaboration with its membership, is also identifying the necessary radiofrequency spectrum for climate monitoring and disaster prediction, detection and relief – including a promising cooperation with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in the field of remote-sensing applications.
Last but not least, we are also a member of – and a strong supporter of – the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, GeSI, in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme and ICT service providers and suppliers.
Cooperation at every level is vital to our success. We will therefore continue to join efforts in the context of the UN system, in order to ‘deliver as one’ with a principal focus on ICTs and climate change.
Back at the beginning of the decade, UN Members adopted the Millennium Declaration as a renewed commitment to human development, including the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Climate change impacts will tend to offset progress being made to meet the MDGs by 2015, however – so it is crucial to empower developing countries by facilitating their access to the ICTs needed for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction.
We feel passionately about this issue at ITU, and as its leader I am absolutely committed to working with our members to address this most important of issues.
This is one battle we simply cannot afford to lose.
Thank you.
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