Christina Shim: Taking IBM’s Sustainability to Another Level

From the rainforests of Kenya to the Great Belt bridge of Denmark, IBM is quietly making its mark in carbon reduction.
For a genuine corporate giant – 310,000 employees in six continents, 18 million LinkedIn followers, 38 national HQs – the IT services and consulting firm tries to tread gently.
This emanates from a culture of creativity and care that has grown as the business has thrived since its formation in 1911.
It is this culture that has been inherited by Christina Shim, who has been IBM’s Chief Sustainability Officer since 2 May 2024.
Christina, who joined the Women in Sustainability panel at Sustainability LIVE Climate Week NYC in September 2024, took over from a legend of sustainability, Wayne Balta, who retired after 40 years in the business.
She speaks to Sustainability Magazine about how she is relishing the challenge.
How are you settling into your role as CSO?
This is an incredibly exciting time to lead IBM’s strategy around sustainability. There is a lot of work ahead in the sustainability field, but I am thrilled to be working on this important issue here.
Sustainability is not just a feel-good word here, it is in our DNA. Our legacy includes leading the charge in creating environmental policies well before most companies (1971), helping to develop international standards and driving toward ambitious environmental goals in line with the UN IPCC. To build on that as IBM prioritises the hybrid cloud and AI space is an amazing opportunity.
In this role, I am able to tap into technology and experts from throughout IBM, as well as collaborate closely with our wonderful partners across the public, private and nonprofit sectors. IBM also serves as “client zero” for many of the cutting-edge technologies that we bring to market, which gives my office the opportunity to test and refine solutions and accelerate our own sustainability efforts with strong support from the business.
What are you enjoying most about the job?
At a time when the sustainability landscape is evolving so dynamically, IBM is the perfect place from which to pursue partnerships, drive forward innovation and deploy technology to help accelerate progress.
We have hundreds of thousands of employees across more than 150 countries and a century of experience in research, innovation and working with our communities. IBM’s mission is to “be the catalyst that makes the world work better,” and it’s one we take seriously.
IBM is already playing a part through our AI and energy efficiency work, materials science innovation and thought leadership in quantum commercial development, as a few examples. There is plenty of opportunity to do even more, as well as more integrally embedding sustainability throughout the enterprise and how we do business and build products.
What do you see as the greatest opportunities and challenges?
There are no shortage of sustainability challenges these days. Last year was the world’s hottest on record, with extreme weather disasters in the US alone amounting to more than US$150bn. Those disasters are upending people’s lives and impacting businesses large and small – disrupting supply chains, insurance markets, energy costs and more.
Yet these same challenges reflect an opportunity, as business, government and society are understanding more than before that our ways of operating face a huge, collective risk that must be addressed.
We are focusing on this opportunity in several ways at IBM, tapping our expertise with technology and AI to supercharge how organisations can leverage their data.
Our purpose-built AI models like Granite are helping leaders understand and respond to environmental changes. This can help agricultural companies predict crop yields amidst increasingly unpredictable weather, or insurers get a better handle on potential fire or flood risks.
For example, the Government of Kenya is using IBM’s geospatial foundation model to help the country fight deforestation and plant 15 billion trees – a critical effort in a country where forested areas retain water and support over a third of the national GDP.
IBM technology is also helping push forward predictive maintenance and sophisticated “asset life management”. Combining existing company data with data from weather, sensors and newer sources like low-cost drones can unlock insights that extend the life of infrastructure and reduce carbon and costs.
This is exactly what IBM helped do with Denmark’s Great Belt bridge and tunnel project, which has extended its lifespan by 100 years thereby and avoids 750,000 tons of CO2.
On the other side, as a leader in AI for business, IBM recognises the critical importance of developing and using these technologies in a sustainable and ethical way. We are proactively leading the way in developing more sustainable AI models to enhance efficiencies and cost optimisation for ourselves and our partners.
We consider AI ethics as part of every use case our technology addresses. We believe we can collectively be smart about the problems we’re looking to address with AI and rightsizing the models and infrastructure in order to address both the opportunities and challenges in the sustainability domain.
Can you tell us a few of the key carbon-cutting programmes IBM is leading?
Reducing emissions is a core goal of mine and we have implemented more than 2,100 conservation projects in recent years that have collectively avoided 256,000 MWh of energy consumption. In fact, in 2023 IBM reached its goal of reducing operational GHG emissions by 65% (from 2010) two years early.
This includes:
- Large-scale electrification project at our third largest energy-consuming location in our global real estate portfolio, set to go fully live by end of this year, with an estimated 70% emissions savings.
- Another example is the upgrade in IT equipment at our data centres, which contributed to more than 58% of our energy conservation savings in 2023.
What is IBM doing to reduce energy consumption by AI and data centres?
IBM has been actively pursuing energy-efficient AI across the full stack. We offer efficiently trained foundation models like Granite at a range of sizes and use a range of optimisation techniques to minimise energy use in their development.
Our researchers have published AI chip designs that are 14 times more energy efficient and in August we released plans for new chips and accelerators to handle AI on mainframes. We also source clean energy for much of our own AI training and inferencing. 74% of the electricity consumed in our data centres last year came from renewable sources and 28 of our data centres are supplied with 100% renewable electricity.
IBM’s sustainability software was also able to reduce the excess, standby “headroom” in one of our own AI workloads from the equivalent of 23 to 13 graphics processing units (GPUs), significantly lowering energy usage and freeing up high-demand GPUs for other purposes — with zero reduction in performance.
IBM even created a Green Data Center along with Syracuse University and New York State to research how energy-efficient technologies can reduce energy costs and environmental impact. We are also a member of the Green Software Foundation and launched an AI working group within The Green Grid to work with industry peers in advancing the sustainability of AI.
To read the full article in the magazine, click HERE.
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