Greenpeace has released the fourth version of its Cool IT Leaderboard and Cisco, Ericsson and Fujitsu ranked atop the list of 17 global high-tech companies. "The Cool IT leaderboard evaluates global IT companies on their leadership in the fight to stop climate change," notes the announcement. "The IT sector possesses the innovative spirit, technological know-how and political influence to bring about a rapid clean energy revolution."
Cisco maintained the top spot in Greenpeace's rankings, which lauded the high-tech company's "commitment to building climate solutions, such as remote collaboration, connected workplace, connected buildings and telecommute offerings, and demonstration of sound methodology in calculating their potential to cut carbon emissions across other sectors of the economy."
IT companies are evaluated by Greenpeace in three areas: efforts to offer economywide technological climate solutions that contribute to global greenhouse gas reductions; initiatives to reduce their own global warming emissions; active engagement in political advocacy and support for science-based climate and energy policies.
New to the latest version are Oracle and Wipro. Despite the progress being made, though, Greenpeace is looking for even more climate-change leadership from the high-tech sector.
"The gap between leaders and laggards has widened in this round," states the report, "as many companies are still failing to incorporate the carbon-reducing potential of IT products and services into core business decisions and development, or into their lobbying efforts."
For instance, companies such as Microsoft, Intel and IBM, and many of the Japanese brands, "received a penalty for failing to make a public break from the negative positions of business associations that represent them," states the Greenpeace report.
Greenpeace regularly updates its Cool IT Leaderboard and, according to the organisation, its goal is to track the progress of the largest IT brands toward achieving economywide greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 15 percent by 2020.
To comment on this article, please email the editor.
Follow CIO on
Twitter @cio_nz
Sign up to receive CIO newsletters.
Click here to subscribe to CIO.
Join the CIO New Zealand group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.