Green IT and Sustainability Initiatives

Green ICT plays a vital role in building environmentally responsible infrastructure while also improving service delivery and operational efficiency. Bahrain has demonstrated a strong commitment to sustainable development by integrating Green ICT into its government strategies and operations. Recognizing the environmental impact of traditional IT practices, the government has embraced digital transformation initiatives along with a set of policies and standards as key enablers for reducing carbon emissions, minimizing paper usage, and promoting energy efficiency.

Cloud-First Approach: The early adoption of cloud computing has allowed Bahrain to achieve a carbon emission saving of 81.903 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2e) compared to running data centers locally between February 2022 and December 2024. Through Bahrain’s Cloud-First Policy, moving to the cloud and minimizing on-prem IT infrastructure can contribute to reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions where cloud technology ensures highly optimized resource usage through on-demand and scalable services.

Digital-First Approach: The Government Digital Policies, specifically the Digital-First Policy, emphasize prioritizing digitization in service delivery and minimizing reliance on physical resources. This approach reduces paper usage for official documents and application forms, plus lowers energy consumption by decreasing the need for customers to travel physically between government offices.

Adoption of Energy-Efficient Technologies: A set of policies and standards have been implemented to optimize the usage of IT resources by government employees and end users. below are two specific examples:

The Government Personal Computing Standards and Guidelines mandate the use of SSD storage rather than HDD where SSD extends battery life and uses 60% to 90% less power compared to HDD. The standards also mandate the use of cloud storage as much as possible to reduce the need for purchasing and operating large storage devices. More importantly, the selection of procured devices is based on the actual business needs to ensure optimum utilization and avoid unnecessary CPU and GPU power consumption.
One of the main objectives of the Printing Procurement and Usage Policy is to contribute to environment protection by implementing Green-IT practices in printing field. The policy pushes towards using electronic means rather than printed hardcopy documentation and correspondence papers. The policy also mandates implementing centralized printing through networked multi-function devices for all government departments except for certain use cases where standalone printers are required. A set of good practices have been considered in the policy to reduce and optimize the use of paper even when printing is a necessity – for example, (1) enforcing black-and-white & double-sided printing as a default setting (2) centralized printers shall be configured to automatically turn into standby mode when they have not been used for certain period of time (maximum 3 minutes) to help reducing energy consumption.

Renewable Energy Goals: the government encourages investment in renewable energy with goals to increase renewable energy usage to 5% by 2025 and 10% by 2030. The government also encourages the adoption of solar energy among citizens and offers soft loans for solar system installations.

Additional Initiatives: In addition to the above strategies, several government entities took extra steps, initiatives and efforts to strengthen Green IT best practices in various sectors: