The government has announced a new strategy to cut its carbon footprint by radically reducing its computer emissions.
The Cabinet Office's new strategy calls on central government department's IT to be carbon neutral by 2013. Emissions will be reduced as much as possible and the rest will be offset.
By 2020 all government IT should be carbon neutral throughout its entire lifetime, including manufacture and disposal, a report by the Cabinet Office proposed.
The agenda will reduce the government’s total carbon emissions by 20 per cent, the equivalent to around 460,000 tonnes a year, said Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson. He expressed hopes the Cabinet Office strategy would be held up as best practice and followed by individuals and the private sector
"I'm so proud that we are the first Government anywhere in the world to formally set out exactly what we're going to do to make our ICT systems carbon neutral within four years," said Watson. "We will not achieve this just by offsetting but by making serious changes to the way we do business," he explained.
Strategies the Cabinet Office has already adopted to reduce energy consumption, include: the automatic switch of all computers outside working hours; the reuse of "as much computer equipment as possible”; and an audit of data centres and server use to make sure they run at the maximum capacity.
Other departments will be asked to base their environmental action plans around similar strategies and will be expected to report on their implementation in their submissions to the Transformational Government Annual Report, said the report.
The commitment comes just days after a report from the Environmental Audit Committee of MPs accused Whitehall of not doing enough to reduce the carbon footprint of central government departments. The report, which drew on research undertaken by the National Audit Office and the Sustsinable Development Commission, claimed that carbon emissions from government departments havbe fallen by less than one per cent in the last seven years, leaving the government well short of its official target of reducing emissions by 12.5 per cent on 2000 levels by 2011.
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