JISC

This project will build on the experience of the Scottish Funding Council funded Carbon Reduction project in Scotland. Running initially in two English regions it will first help institutions assess their ICT related carbon footprints and then to develop action plans to reduce them. The project will work closely with other parts of the Greening ICT programme and will feed its work with institutions into the wider campaigns and dissemination work of the programme.

ICT-related energy and environmental issues are increasingly important in further and higher education. For example, consumption of electricity in data centres, computers and peripherals continues to grow; legislative and regulatory pressures require reductions in ICT-related carbon emissions; and the WEEE Directive has created new requirements for equipment end-of-life disposal.

The costs associated with these issues are rising and the recent JISC-funded SusteIT study estimated that the current ICT-related electricity bill of the UK further and higher education sectors is almost £120 million per annum.

In response to these issues and in support of JISC’s wider approach to addressing Green ICT, the EAUC will develop its successful Scottish ICT Energy and Carbon Management Programme to support the reduction of the sector’s carbon footprint across the rest of the UK.

Although the Scottish project is less than half way to completion, there have already been a number of lessons learned to influence to development of a wider UK project:

• wider use of the SusteIT tool has demonstrated that significant carbon, cost and energy savings are achievable if institutions implement the findings of the Sustainable ICT Action Plans, which are an output of the project;
• there is considerable interest in the project, either as part of the core group or through general association;
• often there is a need for strategic support and reassurance rather than detailed technical expertise, making it possible to achieve considerable benefit from relatively limited consultancy input;
• relative to national activities, the regional dimension is very important:
  • it can create more relevant and specific synergies in activity;
  • regional networks are easier to maintain;
  • actions taken at a known or networked institution have more credibility amongst peers; and
  • there are elements of both inter-regional competition and collaboration.
• collaboration is often achieved through existing regional associations and networks, which offer opportunities to collaborate for mutual benefit;
• a regional dimension also enables:
  • the running of small scale, topic focussed workshops which allow a high level of interaction and support the development of peer networks;
  • identification of expertise within institutions which can be disseminated through subsequent activities.

  It is proposed therefore that a wider UK project should retain some characteristics of the Scotland project, whilst also building on the lessons learned to deliver an even more robust and successful project.

• Through this and other mechanisms, it has proved easy to develop a pool of consultancy resources from within the sector, in particular by ‘buying out’ experts from an institution for several days of work.