Carbon Offsets… Big Benefits or just a Big Con?

With shareholders and consumers increasingly aware of environmental issues, businesses are looking to prove their ‘green credentials’.  The carbon offset market is already worth $4billion per annum... but, are businesses that invest in carbon offset initiatives missing the point and wasting both energy and cash?

Has anyone actually worked out whether it’s practical to keep planting more and more ‘carbon offset trees’ in the third-world? Is there enough land? If data centres continue to gobble more and more energy, when will the available land run out? At the same time, rising food prices are creating pressure to bring more land into agricultural use. There are some complex issues to be considered – yet a major part of the solution might be a lot simpler than many recognise. 

Beyond the PR… lies the potential to cut costs

Merely accepting that data centres consume ever increasing amounts of energy – then purchasing carbon credits to salve one’s conscience and boost one’s Corporate Social Responsibility PR profile – is surely a flawed strategy. Especially when an approach that reduces energy consumption can offer benefits for both the bottom-line and the environment. What’s needed is an informed, multi-staged environmental strategy for IT – with ‘informed’ being the key word:
 

1. Understand your existing IT infrastructure – conduct an Energy Audit. Without an accurate assessment of its infrastructure’s energy consumption, how does a business know whether it’s spending too little or too much on carbon offsets? If you’ve recently undertaken a technology refresh, part of your IT estate may now be consuming less energy – so you could reduce expenditure on carbon offsets.
    
2. Investigate the latest technologies and whether they offer energy cost and carbon footprint savings. Hardware vendors are constantly developing products that are more energy-efficient. In addition, virtualisation and thin-client architectures can drive energy savings.
    
3. Make energy consumption one of the key evaluation criteria for IT investment decisions.
    
4. Identify areas where an upgrade to existing IT infrastructure could reduce energy costs. Today’s higher energy costs now mean that many projects are becoming self-financing.

Think this doesn’t affect your business?

Of course, not all businesses have implemented carbon offset measures. However, with countries already signed up to carbon reductions, under the UN Clean Development Mechanism, it’s surely only a matter of time before governments introduce regulations that will force industry to adopt environmentally sound practices. Couple this with recent, massive increases in energy costs and it’s clear that every business needs to focus on reducing consumption.