A new report has found that sustainable ICT initiatives are stagnant and on the decline worldwide, with Australian organisations underperforming in Green practices.
Fujitsu's ICT Sustainability: The Global Benchmark Report, the vendor's second report on the topic, found a drop in Green ICT initiatives in organisations, from 56.4 per cent in 2010 to 54.3 per cent this year.
This decline indicates organisations may be losing focus on ICT energy efficiency and adopted ICT projects have failed to institutionalise changes across the organisation, according to the report,.
More than half of the 1000 respondents were found to lack understanding of how much power ICT consumes and few ICT departments have prioritised sustainability, with only one in seven including the cost of ICT power consumption in their budgets.
“Not only is there a relative lack of maturity in ICT sustainability policies, practices and technologies but the overall index has declined slightly from 2010, indicating that some of the buzz has gone from Green ICT,” Alison Rowe, Fujitsu’s global executive director sustainability, said in a statement.
“Many organisations have reached a plateau with ICT sustainability. They have tackled the easy initiatives, such as PC power management or telecommuting, but the problem is that even these have declined in performance.”
Out of seven countries, Australia’s ICT sustainability performance ranked fourth behind Canada, the UK and USA, ahead of New Zealand, India and China. Its overall rating came in at 52.8, having slipped from 53.9 last year, and was below the international average of 54.3 per cent.
The report said this decline indicated that Green ICT initiatives had “lost momentum” in Australia.
“Australia’s significant decline… indicates that many local ICT operations may be suffering from ‘Green fatigue’ or initiatives have failed to become institutionalised,” Chris Seale, Fujitsu director sustainability for Australia and New Zealand, said in a statement.
“This is further supported by Australia’s very low visibility of ICT power consumption where less than one per cent of ICT departments are responsible for the cost of ICT’s power consumption.”
The data was collected from an online survey of CIOs and ICT managers in large organisations.
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