John Higgins

The Egyptian IT minister introduced a conference I spoke at recently. He observed that this was the first time he had been at a conference that covered IT’s impact on climate change. It is not difficult to understand why he was surprised, but a panel discussion at Intellect’s first climate change conference last month really brought home to me why it matters to all of us working in IT, and why it matters now.

Intellect’s report High Tech: Low Carbon, launched at the same conference, included a reference to recent work by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, which presented some very alarming findings. According to its calculations, the rate of carbon abatement proposed by the UK government’s Climate Change Bill may be enough to meet our 2050 targets but it is not enough to prevent disastrous levels of CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere ­ levels over 600 parts per million (ppm), enough to make a temperature rise of 4°C a likely scenario.

We need to exceed these targets through radical changes in technology and behaviour. Ramping up the use of technologies such as building management services, logistics software, high-speed broadband and collaborative working software has suddenly become a lot more important.

While this is not a new approach, it is very important because it is the total of CO2 emissions that matters, even more than hitting a particular target by a particular date.

We must do everything we can, collectively and individually, to identify low-carbon technologies as early as possible, to accelerate their development and support their adoption. This is where IT managers have a vital role to play.

The UK government is providing unprecedented levels of support for innovation through schemes like the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme and the Energy Technologies Institute.

Specialist sources of venture capital, such as Carbon Trust Investments, are also emerging alongside traditional offerings. The European Commission supports similar approaches, backed by funding under the Entrepreneurship and Innovation programme. In short, an environment suited to the development of low-carbon technologies is being created.

But this is only part of the picture. The more IT managers demand low-carbon products and services from their suppliers, the more the industry will develop them. Customers can therefore drive competition around efficiency. We already see this clearly in laptop computers, for which battery life and energy efficiency is an important purchasing criterion. Laptops, as a result, are very energy efficient.

On the supplier side of the industry, we need to provide more energy choice and better information on efficiency, but we also need to encourage our customers to take energy efficiency into account in their purchasing. For most customers, energy efficiency is a long way down on the list of criteria.

Chief executive officers at many of the industry’s largest companies are committed to both improving the energy efficiency of their products and to developing products that will help save energy in other ways.

IT departments should take a holistic view of their energy consumption and act to reduce it as soon as possible. A good start might be to make sure the IT department is responsible for its energy costs. I would also like to see more customers telling their suppliers to become “greener”. As a customer you hold tremendous power over the vendor community. Use it.