Browse
Engage
Research
The announcement comes hand in hand with both additional funding for green IT and a request for companies in the sector to set voluntary goals for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.
"For decades to come, ICT will underpin the competitiveness of our economy, the efficiency of our public services and our quality of life. Europe represents the largest share of the world's ICT market, and our economic performance and jobs depend on these technologies," Viviane Reding, the E.U.'s commissioner for information society and media, said at an event in Brussels.
As Reding outlined the beneficial impacts of green IT, the E.C. also announced that it would be increasing the amount of funding by more than 50 percent in the coming years -- from an expected 1.1 billion Euros in 2010 (about $1.5 billion) to 1.7 billion Euros in 2013 (about $2.3 billion).
Among the technologies that the E.U. is hoping to see a boom in as a result of the funding are building energy efficiency -- which could save an estimated 17 percent of energy consumption -- and smarter transportation logstics, saving as much as 27 percent of GHG emissions.
Along the lines of goals that the E.C. has in mind for industry leaders to adopt are the same voluntary targets that companies laid out in the Smart 2020 report published late last year. In that report, companies including Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and other IT giants set a range of targets for environmental improvments. Far and away the most ambitious of the targets set was British Telecom's goal of reducing its overall emissions by 80 percent over 1996 levels by 2020.
In a new report published at the time of Reding's speech, "A Strategy for ICT R&D and Innovation in Europe: Raising the Game," the European Commission laid out the three targets for using IT to fight climate change: in addition to funding, research and development an dinformation sharing are key planks of the platform. You can download the full report from GreenerComputing.com.
