This year is on track to be the hottest on record. Wildfires, floods, and droughts are mounting. And climate-driven refugee crises span continents.

That’s why Climate Week NYC 2024 — with its theme of “It’s Time” — was so critical. Hosted by the international non-profit Climate Group, in conjunction with the U.N. General Assembly and New York City, it brought together a far-ranging mix of government, industry, academia, and activists.

All share the same overarching goal: to drive action on climate — before it’s too late.

For Cisco, Climate Week is a unique opportunity to showcase its innovation, global influence, and leadership on an issue that is central to its purpose: powering an inclusive future for all.

During her Climate Week sessions, Mary de Wysocki, Cisco’s SVP and chief sustainability officer, highlighted a few of the ways Cisco exercises that leadership. It includes everything from innovating more energy-efficient networking solutions and circular-designed products to setting stringent 2040 net-zero goals and supporting its vast global customer base on their own sustainability journeys. Moreover, the Cisco Foundation’s 10-year $100 million climate commitment is helping drive important work in areas like carbon capture and wave energy.

“Cisco is a worldwide technology company that securely connects everything to make anything happen,” de Wysocki said. “But we ask, how do we solve those business problems while using newer technologies to make the world a better place, a more secure and sustainable place?”

And as Guy Diedrich, Cisco’s SVP and global innovation officer, stressed, the company’s focus on climate change has deep roots.

“Cisco’s role in helping contribute to reducing climate change is profound, and it has been around for a very long time,” he said. “Before anybody was talking about climate change, Cisco was leading the industry in practices that help us contribute to the betterment of populations and the environment around the world.”

Today, when Cisco products become more energy efficient, as well as modular, recyclable, and reusable (that is, circular), the benefits can cascade across industries, countries, and continents.

“We are working hand in hand with our customers on how they’re adopting similar approaches as us, and adopting renewable energy,” de Wysocki explained. “It means innovating our products to be more energy efficient, like our Silicon One chip, which adds more capability in an ever-increasing, energy-efficient way. And it means that when we design our products that we’re thinking about how to make them more modular and circular.”

In terms of circularity, Cisco is making progress on its goal of incorporating Circular Design Principles into 100 percent of new products and packaging by fiscal year 2025. And in its latest G200 version, the Silicon One chip is twice as energy efficient as its predecessor.   

“With service providers we’ve seen really healthy numbers of energy savings and energy efficiency,” said Denise Lee, vice president of Cisco’s Engineering Sustainability Office. “And now our strategy is to take that Silicon One chip and make it available beyond service provider, and into the enterprise.”

When smart equals more sustainable

Artificial intelligence was top of mind throughout Climate Week, both for its great potential in sustainable innovation — such as enabling smarter grids, buildings, and factories — and for its massive energy needs. To that end, Cisco’s efforts to increase data-center capabilities with innovations like Silicon One and the UCS X-Series Modular System, while reducing their energy needs, loom large.  

“Now we’re looking at AI workloads,” Lee explained, “and whether you have a brand-new training model or you’re just playing around with it, the reality is everyone needs more and more compute and more and more capacity. So, we need to be thinking about how to do that with energy efficiency.”

Lee spoke of how Cisco is infusing AI into many areas, such as smart buildings and data centers to renewable energy grids and agriculture.

“When you start thinking of where you can apply data and sensors and then what that data can do from an AI perspective to be smarter and more automated,” she said, “that opens up a world of opportunities to more quickly find solutions and then deploy those solutions at scale.”

The grids supplying those energy-hungry data centers (and just about everything else!) are another key focus for Cisco. The company has a long history of partnering and innovating with the energy sector, and today it’s helping utilities transition to a more sustainable, efficient, and secure future. That includes supporting renewable sources like wind and solar, which along with their many benefits can create new complexities across a more distributed grid (as opposed to one centralized power station).

So, it’s a perfect opportunity for automation, AI, and machine learning in applications such as load balancing and monitoring for anomalies or threats — as top Cisco customers like Enel, Italy’s largest energy provider, are discovering.

“Forward thinking utilities are increasingly considering digital technologies as a part of their architectures,” said Kelsi Doran, head of sustainability strategy and transformation for Cisco. “It enables them to have better visibility into their entire OT network so they can do things like more efficiently balance the load of supply and demand. Utilities are adopting these things so they can not only accelerate the clean energy transition, but their digital business-model transformation as well.”

With end-to-end solutions for utilities, Cisco, Doran believes, is uniquely positioned to support this transition.

“What differentiates Cisco in this space,” she said, “is our unrivaled security expertise, our end-to-end portfolio, especially in our networking solutions, our automation, our management capabilities, and of course our Internet of Things expertise. We can provide that connectivity, that visibility, that security across the entire grid network.”

Increasing sustainability, where we live and work

By some estimates, the building environment is a source of up to 40 percent of global carbon emissions. So, smart buildings are a critical focus for Cisco. And New York’s Climate Week was a great opportunity to showcase the company’s Penn One office. Built with hybrid work in mind, it’s a visually inspiring, hyperconnected design with many features that can reduce energy use, such as automated window shades to maximize natural light.

Cisco’s smart building solutions also help reduce energy consumption through 90-watt Power over Ethernet (PoE) and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors that can provide network-based monitoring and control of temperature, lighting, air quality, and more.

“A building or a room requires the network,” Lee stressed. “And when you can start thinking of where you can apply data and sensors — and then what that data can do from an AI perspective to be smarter and more automated — it opens up a world of opportunities to more quickly find solutions and then deploy those solutions at scale.”

Working together to meet the biggest challenges

Diedrich, who oversees Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) and Networking Academy tech skills programs, stressed that Climate Week’s theme of working together is closely aligned with Cisco’s strategy.

“The CDA program has been around for just over 10 years, and we have around 1600 active or completed individual digitization projects in 51 countries,” he said, “and the thing that we learned is that you will not have the sort of success that you want without involving government, industry and academia. You have to have all three sitting around at the table from the start. And it's never been more true than our projects related to sustainability.”

As but one example, Diedrich cited CDA’s partnership with Kerala, India, to empower farmers with IoT data insights on weather, soil, water management, limiting pesticides, and other support.

It's a theme championed by de Wysocki.

“When I look at the number of companies like Cisco that have set net zero goals across their value chains, that gives me hope,” she concluded. “When I look at the technology advancements, when I think about how we’re designing products and solutions that are ever more energy efficient, when I see the number of investments in renewable energy, that gives me hope. But it’s going to take all of us coming together.”