By Isabelle Chan
Tuesday, May 08 2007 04:34 PM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/business/0,39044229,62011422,00.htm

With the exception of mature markets like Australia and New Zealand, the call for Asia to be eco-friendly is falling largely on deaf ears, Gartner analysts say.

Simon Mingay, research vice-president at Gartner, told ZDNet Asia: "Outside of Japan, Australia and New Zealand, there are very low levels of awareness related to the environmental impact of IT. I don't see this changing in the short to mid-term.

"The catalyst for change would most likely be [the implementation of] stringent carbon quotas," Mingay added.

Brian Prentice, research director for emerging trends and technologies at Gartner, was a little more optimistic, pointing to high-level initiatives taken by some governments to address the green issue.

Prentice said: "There is an awareness of carbon emissions around Asia-Pacific. China, for example, does have an Office of the National Coordination Committee for Climate Change. Singapore has plans to improve 1990 levels by 25 per cent in the next seven years, while India has signed the Kyoto Protocol, although they're not required to cut emissions at this stage."

However, on when IT buyers in the Asia-Pacific region would start to seriously look at the green issue, the industry analyst noted the difficulty in generalizing the region due to market diversity.

Prentice said highly-developed countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, have a greater degree of latitude on how to address the problem. "[That is] because they're established and wealthy economies, although Australia's reliance on coal for exports is a notable exception," Prentice said.

"But it is more challenging to apply the same criteria to developing nations like China and India, where a reduction in carbon emissions can pose challenges to the economic growth, which has become a critical component of their political landscapes," he added.

Based on the amount of energy PCs, servers, printers, cooling, fixed and mobile phone systems, networks and telecommunications equipment use within the world's offices, Gartner estimates that the global information and communications technology (ICT) industry accounts for about 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions--a figure equivalent to aviation.

Gartner recommends IT organizations develop a strategy to address the negative effects of using ICT, which should include these components:

• Measure power consumption;
• Consume fewer servers and printers by increasing utilization, for instance, through deploying server virtualization;
• Stop over-provisioning, and improve capacity planning;
• Turn power management on, use a low-power state or turn equipment off after hours;
• Extend the life of assets by reusing within the enterprise and externally;
• Ensure and validate the correct disposition of all electronic equipment; and
• Analyze all waste