Carbon Trust advises on IT carbon emissions

The UK body representing business users of communication, networks and IT services has announced a project to support the use of voice and data communications equipment to realise carbon savings.

The Communications Management Association (CMA) will work with the Carbon Trust on the Carbon Intent' project, which will provide its enterprise members corporate IT users throughout the UK with an independent source of information, guidance and benchmarks for the adoption of carbon-efficient, IT-enabled business processes.

The Carbon Intent project's first phase will identify the tech that can have a tangible effect on reducing emissions, with an initial focus on encouraging businesses to place greater emphasis on teleconferencing and home working.

Glenn Powell, CMA chief executive, said the increased attention paid by larger corporate and public sector organisations to their own carbon reduction and energy efficiency strategies was welcome.

But he added: "The time has now come to address the business user community's needs from an expert, independent, impartial perspective. Working with the Carbon Trust has made this pilot stage possible."

The Carbon Trust is matching the CMA's funding of an initial pilot study during 2008-9 that aims to develop guidelines and benchmarks about voice and data equipment use to realise carbon savings.

The project will communicate these guidelines, as well as best practice case studies and research results, through a new Low Carbon and Sustainability' special interest group and online forum to directly involve interested companies.

Powell added that CMA members spend over 13 billion on IT each year, making the need to find more energy efficient IT solutions important.

"Through the Carbon Intent initiative we propose to draw together and share examples of current best practice from video-conferencing to logistics and transport planning to home working," he said.

The project will be completed by 31st March 2009 and will be managed on behalf of CMA by the sustainable development and communications specialist, Hannover Consultancy.

The CMA is part of the British Computing Society (BCS) Group and the Carbon Intent project is part of the BCS' work to tackle carbon emissions in the IT industry. This project complements the launch of the BCS Data Centre Special Interest Group project on energy reduction in data centres, which is also supported by the Carbon Trust.