Carbon Masters recently won a tender to provide on going technical advice to the European Commission in Brussels. Kevin Houston Director of Carbon Masters will be a member of an independent expert panel set up to assist the commission as part of their efforts to encourage the Information and

Telecommunications sector (ICT) to develop common methodologies to capture

the environmental impact of ICT.

Due to its rapid growth, ICT has a expanding carbon footprint, estimated in 2008 at 2% of global emissions. ICT is already responsible for more than 8% of Europe’s electricity consumption and this will more than double by 2020 unless the industry takes greater steps to improve energy efficiency. On the other hand, ICT can play an important role in reducing emissions from

other sectors of the economy particularly transport, construction and the power sector.

The Commission has requested the ICT sector to develop a common methodology for capturing its environmental impact and then to broadly adopt the measure across the industry to both measure and then reduce its carbon emissions and energy consumption.

Several standardization bodies including the International Telecommunications Union ITU have

begun work on this and have already developed two recommendations one covering how to measure the embedded carbon and energy in ICT goods networks and services and the other on how to measure the ICT footprint in an organization .

The first approach uses life cycle cialis generic india analysis based on the International standards ISO 1440 and 1444 to measure the energy use and Greenhouse (GHG) emissions across the various

life cycle phases i.e raw material extraction, production, use and end of life/disposal. The supply chain complexity of most ICT products is daunting. Many hardware components are manufactured in one part of the world what does viagra do to you and then assembled in other parts of the world before being shipped to their eventual use destination before their eventual disposal, much of which still ends up on waste tips in India and China.

The second recommendation for ICT in organisations is again based on international standards ISO 14064 part 1 and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Standard but does cialis work right away takes a carbon accounting approach to assess the GHG emissions and energy consumption of ICT in organisations.

Both new recommendations have been developed by a wide group of stakeholders including leading ICT organisations, Governments and the European Commission. Several ICT organisations have “road tested” the methodologies in a series of trails organised by the Commission.

The ITU is now developing two further recommendations one on ICT projects and the second on ICT in Cities. Both of these are designed to help gauge how ICT projects could reduce carbon emissions at a city scale e.g the large scale use of video conferencing and its impact on reduced travel emissions. Given that cities are responsible for 80% of global carbon emissions leveraging ICT to reduce those emissions is going to be critical if we are to achieve the targets we have signed up for in

Europe.