BT Strives to Cut CO2 by 80 Percent

June 10, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Communications solutions and services provider BT (bt.com) announced on Tuesday its new carbon reduction initiative which sets to cut the company’s carbon emissions intensity by 80 percent across the globe by 2020.

The news comes just a week after HP’s research unit, HP Labs, announced a similar “green” initiative of its own where it will create sustainable data centers that help reduce its carbon footprint by 75 percent.

BT also published a new model for measuring and tracking carbon emissions, backed by the Carbon Disclosure Project, which the company says “represents an important step in measuring carbon emissions in a consistent way across the globe.”

“This is a ground-breaking new way of setting targets,” says Jonathon Porritt, founder director of Forum for the Future and chair of BT’s advisory panel. “If all companies adopted such a target we would be a long way towards fixing the problem of climate change.”

The new model was developed by Dr. Chris Tuppen, BT’s director of sustainable development. Internationally renowned for his work in this field, Tuppen was recently named by the Guardian Newspaper as one of the “50 people most likely to save the Planet” in 2008.

Tuppen says the model develops a “relationship between BT’s CO2 emissions and its financial performance so that they become interdependent,” making it a “powerful tool for embedding sustainability into organizations worldwide and critical in effecting change.”

The Climate Stabilization Intensity Target addresses the issue of rising CO2 emissions in the corporate sector, providing an effective tool that links a company’s financial and environmental performance to the necessary CO2 reductions.

The project is consistent with the worldwide reduction imperatives outlined in the Stern Report and reports by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The model is unique in that it enables companies to achieve business growth while maintaining strict global CO2 reductions, says BT.

BT says it intends to meet the 80 percent reduction target through an ongoing combination of energy efficiency, on-site renewable generation which aims for 25 percent of its UK electricity to stem from dedicated wind turbines by 2016, and purchased low-carbon electricity.

BT has already cuts its emissions in the UK by nearly 60 percent between 1996 and 2008.

Tags: British Telecom, carbon emissions, carbon footprint, climate change, data center