NTT Docomo, leading mobile operator and provider of advanced mobile services, announced in its website a new 10-year environmental vision that would allow the company to help lower carbon footprints, strengthen recycling and protect biodiversity.

Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten and Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Mark Dreyfus released recently a new public consultation paper on tax breaks for redevelopments that will substantially improve the energy efficiency of existing buildings in Australia.

Korea's Ministry of Environment has officially released the guidelines on greenhouse gas and energy target management system for the public sector.

There is growing interest among city builders and governments around the area of smart cities. Bettina Tratz-Ryan, Research VP of Environmental Sustainability for Gartner, discusses some of the challenges faced by governments, industry leaders and vendors faced to design, build and maintain cities built with smarts right from the start.

This APC paper provides an overview of energy cost and carbon allocation strategies and their precision. We show that it is both easy and inexpensive for any data center, large or small, new or old, to get started allocating costs and carbon, but the expense and complexity escalate and ROI declines when excessive precision is specified.

Green and sustainability present both a threat and opportunity to industries in general and manufacturers in particular. Energy efficiency is a necessary step for manufacturers, but alone it is not sufficient. To be successful and emerge as winners in the carbon economy, companies need to take a value chain model-based approach and continuously broaden and deepen that model to drive global and local optimizations in order to maintain and increase competitive advantage.

IT managers today are pressed to find ways to minimize operational costs through reducing energy consumption significantly and adopt green initiatives for the data center. Extreme Networks shows tips on how to build the right data center to cut down energy intensive practices, reduce operational cost and create a more sustainable green IT environment.

Governments are starting to recognise the need to reduce its carbon footprint and mitigate negative environmental impacts. Green IT can reduce exponentially the consumption and costs associated with critical, energy-intensive government IT functions, like the datacentre and the desktop. Victor Tsao, GM for Citrix Systems in Greater China, offers three key areas to help public-sector green efforts.

There is a growing interest around smart cities. How to go about planning, designing, building and managing such new cities remains a key challenge. The Future Design Center is a pilot project to be built at the Kashiwanoha Campus in Japan. With the backing of academia and industry heavyweights like SAP Japan, SHARP, Nikken Sekkei, HP Japan, and Mitsui Fudosan, the Future Design Center Incorporated Association aims to present a smart city model to Japan and the world.

The first step in going green is taking an inventory of what you have and matching your business requirements to your infrastructue. Only through a careful study of your business' computing needs over the near, mid and long-term can you truly develop a computing strategy/platform that fits your business objectives while remaining true to the goals of becoming green.