EIF 2024 Review - Sustainability

ARC’s European Industry Forum, part of the successful series of worldwide conferences in Europe, America and Asia, has been held in Sitges (Barcelona), Spain on May 6-8, 2024. The event offered exclusive presentations and workshops on strategies and case studies in line with this year’s topic “Managing Digital Transformation in the Age of AI, Open Architectures, and Sustainability” to its 150 international participants from over 20 countries. 

Sustainability and Decarbonization
The sustainability session anticipated in Sustainability and Decarbonization @ EIF 2024 | ARC Advisory Group was held on Monday afternoon with a high attendance level. After a short introduction about ARC Europe Decarbonization Technology report, three speakers shared their experience in relation to sustainability.

The first speaker was Peter Kwaspen from Shell Global solutions. Peter, who currently leads OT&IT development projects supporting the Asset of the Future ambition of Shell, shared his view on how instrumentation and safety is related to Sustainability and specifically on decarbonization.

Secondly Prabhu Soundarrajan from the International Society of Automation (ISA) provided insights on how automation is enabling companies to achieve their sustainability goals. As Prabhu is also involved in an investment group as operating partner at Kingston capital, he also shared his view on sustainability from a business opportunity perspective.

Finally, Dr. Florian Albrecht from Siemens explained how Siemens is helping companies to transform reporting into a strategic advantage, demonstrate sustainability commitment and attract environmentally conscious customers. Through its solution SiGreen, Siemens is helping the industry move forward to reach the sustainability goals.

Live survey
Through an easy to access app, people were able to answer three questions which the panelist then reflected on. The questions covered different aspects related to sustainability and specifically to decarbonization.
-    Why are companies investing in decarbonization? Exploring business drivers behind their initiatives.
-    How are companies planning to achieve their objectives? Reflecting on long- and short-term actions
-    What technologies are companies applying to reach their net-zero objective? Evaluating different technologies in terms of relevance.

The three-panelist reflected on the results from different perspectives from the industry. Peter mentioned how Shell is investing in all the long-and short-term actions covered by the survey. Florian was pleased to see that Carbon Accounting was one of the most relevant technologies selected by the people and Prabhu highlighted the relevance of the pressure of investment groups to help industry to achieve their sustainability goals.
The panel discussion also led to further and energic interaction between the people attending. One of the topics raised and further discussed was obsolescence and the session had to end a little bit later than expected.

ARC’s European Industry Forum & Platform
We like to thank our sponsors, who supported the ARC EIF 2023, and all our speakers and presenters, who made the event interesting, exciting and memorable. The next Forum will take place in Sitges (Barcelona), Spain, on May 5 – 7.
For more information, please contact Ann-Kathrin Blech (mailto:[email protected]).