MEASURING CARBON FOOTPRINT OF COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY; A CASE STUDY AT ICIMOD

Being an organization working and advocating on environment issues, and having been using extensive IT to carry out its operations, projects and programmes, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain development, ICIMOD, www.icimod.org, was keen to measure the carbon footprint of its computing technology out of IT use mainly. There was equally the motivation to go green with IT as the organization looked into reducing operating expenses, be socially responsible by reducing environmental impact and to support the broader scientific consensus on climate change, which is another priority working area of ICIMOD. Thus, in this study focus has been given to calculate total power consumption by users computers, individually and collectively, and the same for the server systems hosted. To calculate carbon footprint, the power consumed figure have been fed into an widely accepted algorithm from AMEE, www.amee.com to take stock of carbon emissions in terms kg of CO2 equivalents. Various other analogies has been drawn from the results obtained ranging from server to distributed PCs ratio of CO2 emission, individual CO2 emission from computer use raising awareness for staff, consideration of other phases of product, besides use, and pretest on response to effect of applying a common power management strategy. The outcome was also compared with the results from similar measurements by a computer product manufacturer, using another approach, thereby corroborating the results. Further, in this phase of the work, key figures and thereby trend has come out to take actions and influence IT asset procurement. This paper therefore highlights the importance of calculating and knowing IT carbon footprint, following which how organizations can reap benefit in reducing costs and environmental impact through green computing, and features experience of a leading-edge, mid-sized organization.