Summary Bullets:

• Orange Business has enhanced its Flux Vision real-time population flow observation tool with measurement of carbon footprints produced by the movement of people and goods.

• Using anonymized technical data points and AI-driven analysis, it helps local authorities, and tourism, distribution, and transport customers address sustainability challenges and save money.

Orange Business Flux Vision is a real-time population flow observation tool that provides anonymized data from the company’s mobile network. Launched ten years ago, the GDPR-compliant solution helps in implementing development strategies by local authorities and customers in the tourism, distribution, and transport industries.

On April 4 2024, Orange Business announced the integration of new indicators into its Flux Vision tool to measure the carbon footprint produced by the movement of people and goods. Flux Vision enables analysis of millions of anonymized technical data points in real time on the Orange consumer mobile network to provide data and trend analysis for target enterprise and government customers. Now it will also be able to provide data to help meet sustainability challenges.

This analysis is enabled by innovations in AI to measure, evaluate, and identify effective actions to reduce carbon footprints – notably in the tourism and logistics industries. This includes algorithms to associate the mode of transport used to go to an event with the travel speed between antennae on the Orange mobile network. The data can then be combined with the CO2 emission factors linked to each type of transport, recovered from the Empreinte database, to assess the carbon footprint.

Use case examples include Flux Vision indicators helping to improve the efficiency of intelligent public lighting by measuring visitor numbers every 30 minutes, and Flux Vision supporting and optimizing a waste prevention campaign on beaches by analyzing visitor numbers.

Although far from exclusive to Orange and only using Orange’s data, there are growing numbers of such solutions (e.g., Virgin Media O2 Business recently announced a partnership with the UK Government’s Office for National Statistics for mobile user movement insights to be inform data-driven policy decisions), none of them is individually revolutionary, but when combined they demonstrate the potential for technology to enable improvements in reaching sustainability goals and reducing damage to the environment through greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).

Also, to address those who are more skeptical about climate change, there is always the argument that by using technology in a smart way it is possible to save costs through optimal use of electricity, and to help maximise enterprise customer satisfaction by providing information to optimize their cost base and revenue opportunities.

Once again, tech-enabled ESG is making a continued contribution to meeting the vital challenges of climate change – especially as March 2024 has officially been reported to be the hottest on record.