IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2015 - 44

concerns" [17], although it only considers greenhouse
gas emissions, leaving other environmental impact,
such as decreases in biodiversity, aside. However,
carbon footprints help to measure and compare the
impact of products and services on climate change. As
an example, the global carbon footprint of the ICT sector in 2007 was 830 MtCO2e [5], which was about 2%
of the total global greenhouse gas emissions of that
year [18].

Emergence of Green IT
Within the ICT sector, the concept of Green ICT aims
to increase the sustainability of ICT systems. Murugesan defines Green IT as "the study and practice of
designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of
computers, servers, and associated subsystems (such
as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking
and communications systems) efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment"
[19]. Green IT can be directly transferred to the combined sector of information and communication technologies, resulting in the term Green ICT. Examples of
Green ICT are energy efficient end user systems (thin
clients), the substitution of physical systems by virtualization, and providing applications and data storage
as a network service (cloud computing), to optimize
resource usage.
The approach of providing more sustainable ICT
Systems is important for controlling the growth of the
ICT sector's own carbon footprint. Making ICT systems
green is an attempt to secure the enabling effect of ICT
in other sectors. It can avoid that the savings enabled by
ICT are neutralized by the sector's own growing emissions. The main role of ICT in a low-carbon society is its
function as an enabling technology. Although the ICT
sector can directly contribute to lowering greenhouse
gas emissions by improving the energy efficiency of
their systems, the benefits of new application areas
for ICT systems to potentially reduce emissions are
expected to be much larger.

Author Information
Michael Königsmayr graduated with a Master of Social
and Economic Sciences from the Vienna University of
Technology, Austria.
Thomas Neubauer is with XYLEM Technologies, Favoritenstrasse 16, 1040 Vienna, Austria; email: neubauer@
xylem-technologies.com.

References
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IEEE TEchnology and SocIETy MagazInE

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MARCH 2015

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/glossary/ipcc-glossary.pdf http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/ http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/ http://www.businessdictionary.com/ http://www.visualthesaurus.com http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htm http://books.google.com/ http://books.google.at/books http://books.google.com/books?id http://http:// http://books.google.at/books?id=oMkVQgAACAAJ http://www http://www.ictliteracy.info/rf.pdf/Gartner

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