by Simon Mingay | April 29, 2010 | 2 Comments
A combination of the recession, continued focus on productivity, organizational and individual responses to climate change, changing demographics in the workplace, changing views on the acceptability of “junkets” or jollies, and Icelandic volcanoes, have created a significant change in attitudes towards business travel. I’d hesitate to talk about the “perfect storm” at this stage, but [...]
Category: Uncategorized Tags: Sustainability
by Simon Mingay | April 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Earth Day is upon us again, an opportunity to pause and reflect on where the IT industry is. On the whole I’m very optimistic and boy have we come a long way in the last 5 years, particularly relative to other industry sectors. 2005 was when I started actively covering how climate change and sustainability [...]
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: Green IT, Sustainability
by Simon Mingay | April 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Last week IBM announced (http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2010/04/smarter-sustainabilityold.html) that it was requiring all its’ supplier to put in place an environmental management system (EMS). Here’s what they are asking suppliers to do :- We’re asking them to establish voluntary environmental goals and measure performance for at least three topics applicable to virtually all businesses: energy conservation, greenhouse gas [...]
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: Sustainability
by Simon Mingay | April 19, 2010 | Comments Off
This news item from the BBC related to the UK’s global water front caught my eye this morning. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8628832.stm Water footprints are different to carbon footprints for a number of reasons. With carbon/GHG emissions it’s the balance between carbon input vs that output in a process/cycle, and a tonne of carbon produced in the UK [...]
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: Green IT, Sustainability
by Simon Mingay | April 16, 2010 | Comments Off
There is a good business continuity story here of course. But also an interesting sustainability perspective (I’ve always said the cloud would be good for sustainability). ICT remote collaboration tools will never replace travel, but it can certainly reduce the need for it significantly. You can be sure that a lot of those people grounded and [...]
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: Green IT, Sustainability
by Simon Mingay | April 6, 2010 | 2 Comments
As a number of blogs and articles have observed the recent report from Greenpeace http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/make-it-green-cloud-computing.pdf has some technical flaws. The main issue for me, is that they seem to conflate “the cloud” and “the internet” and “information technology”, and then don’t really address the potential environmental benefits of real cloud computing. If they had simply [...]
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by Simon Mingay | December 22, 2009 | Comments Off
In the melee that was the last few days of the Climate Summit negotiations in Copenhagen many things fell down the cracks, including information and communications technology (ICT). No sign of the text that the ITU and others were trying to get added. Nothing binding or definitive for the enterprise carbon management software providers or [...]
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: COP15, Green IT, Sustainability, UN Climate Conference
by Simon Mingay | December 16, 2009 | Comments Off
Towns and Cities, the buildings that they consist of, the infrastructure and services that support them, will all play an important role in tackling climate change. Yesterday the Climate Summit for Mayors started (http://www.climatesummitformayors.dk/). From a distance, compared to what we seem to be witnessing in the Bella Center in Copenhagen this seems an oasis [...]
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: COP15, Green IT, Sustainability, UN Climate Summit
by Bettina Tratz-Ryan | December 15, 2009 | 2 Comments
For the past days, different scientific reports being presented during the COP15 conference in Kopenhagen, with mounting pressure on the ICT industry to bring out solutions to curb the impact of climate change. It becomes clear that communications infrastructure, while contributing to 2 percent of carbon footprint, has the opportunity to mitigate climate change through [...]
Category: Uncategorized Tags: COP15, Environmental Sustainability, Green IT, UN Climate Conference
by Simon Mingay | December 14, 2009 | Comments Off
The goal of those representing the information & communications technology (ICT) industry at the Climate Summit in Copenhagen is to get “recognition” amongst policymakers that ICT has a significant role to play in tackling climate change. The ITU (a UN agency which among other things is charged with developing standards in ICT) is pushing for [...]
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: COP15, Green IT, Sustainability, UN Climate Summit
