GIGAEurope members, Liberty Global, NOS, TDC Group and Vodafone Group, joined the European Green Digital Coalition as founding members and signed the Declaration. This has been welcomed by EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, and the EU Presidency at Digital Day 2021 in Lisbon, Portugal. 

By signing the declaration, companies commit to establishing science-based targets to reduce GHG emissions by 2030 and to become climate neutral/Net Zero no later than 2040.

Continued investments in networks and data centers allowed GIGAEurope members to significantly reduce their environmental impact while at the same time upgrading their high capacity networks to provide gigabit speeds. Additionally, GIGAEurope members are important enablers of green innovation for other sectors, through the digital transformation made possible by the gigabit connectivity.

Irina Varlan, Managing Director of GIGAEurope: “Our members are innovators in providing gigabit access to millions of Europeans in a sustainable and innovative way. We are proud to support this initiative by the European Commission. We hope this movement will inspire other organisations to join.”

Next to reducing GHG-emissions, these companies also commit to:

• Invest in the development and deployment of green digital solutions with significant energy and material efficiency that achieve a net positive impact in a wide range of sectors.
• Engage with relevant organisations to develop standardised, credible and comparable assessment methodologies of the net impact on environment and climate of green digital solutions in priority sectors such as energy, transport, manufacturing, agriculture and the building sector. 
• Promote cross-sectoral dialogue and contribute to the development of guidelines and recommendations for deployment of green digital solutions in different sectors, and encourage workforce upskilling. 

During Digital Day 2021, Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for the Internal Market said: "European companies and public administrations produce an enormous amount of European data that we want to make available for our companies. This data needs the infrastructure to circulate and to be processed so value is duly extracted from it. That is why we need global level connectivity; infrastructure is the foundation of the next digital decade."

GIGAEurope is hopeful that this declaration will support building a greener Europe for the welfare of all European citizens.