IT's carbon emissions keep on climbing

Despite emergence of new energy-efficient systems, new reports insist the IT industry is struggling to reduce its carbon footprint

Two new reports have today highlighted the scale of the environmental challenge facing the UK's IT industry, revealing that carbon emissions from the sector are continuing to soar and many IT departments are ill-equipped to tackle the problem.

The first study, from environmental charity Global Action Plan's recently launched Environmental IT Leadership Team, concluded that ICT equipment accounts for two per cent of the world's carbon emissions, putting the sector on a par with the aviation industry.

Entitled An Inefficient Truth, the report also argued that emissions from IT were growing faster than those from aviation, noting that in 2006, 48 per cent more data storage capacity was sold than in the previous year, compared with a three per cent increase in UK air travel passengers in the same period.

Trewin Restorick, director of Global Action Plan and chairman of the Environmental IT Leadership Team, said that the scale of IT's carbon footprint meant that the government would have to target the sector if it is to comply with the legally binding emission reduction targets included in its soon-to-be-introduced climate change bill.

However, Restorick added that the problem was being exacerbated by government policies requiring ever-greater quantities of electronic data be stored. He argued that if the government wanted firms to cut their IT-related emissions, there was a need for a review of current data storage legislation and a greater onus on incentives and policies that were "more supportive and less contradictory".

Advocates of energy efficient IT systems such as virtualisation software and intelligent cooling technologies have long maintained that the products already exist to reduce the energy requirements of a typical IT department by up to 80 per cent.

However, the report's survey of 120 UK IT chiefs found that the vast majority of firms are not currently in any position to instigate an effective green IT strategy. Almost nine out of 10 respondents did not know their department's carbon footprint, while just 20 per cent had seen energy bills relating to IT's power use.

Six out of 10 of those surveyed identified cost and time pressures as the main barriers to adopting more sustainable IT strategies, with a majority also claiming tax breaks and industry-wide energy efficiency standards were required to help drive adoption of green technologies.

Tom Kelly, managing director of IT services firm and report sponsors Logicalis UK, warned that IT chiefs would have to learn to better evaluate the efficiency of their IT infrastructure and undertake greater measures to limit energy use if they wanted to head off more legislation.

The report came as a separate study from Fujitsu Siemens Computers estimated that over one million tonnes of excess carbon emissions are being generated as a result of the poor design of UK datacentres. The research found that a large chunk of datacentre-related carbon emissions, equivalent to the emissions of a city the size of Oxford, could be easily avoided if firms adopted energy efficient design principles, such as optimising server layout to limit pressure on cooling systems.

Steve Kendall-Smith, vice president for UK and Ireland at Fujitsu Siemens Computers, said that many firms were guilty of underestimating the environmental and financial impact of their poorly designed datacentres. "The truth is that many companies still do not grasp the disproportionate amount of power used by their datacentres, many of which are based on sprawling and/or ageing server farms that are costing businesses millions of pounds to manage," he added.