Next month, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen will create many hundreds of column inches about sustainability issues, reports Adam Oxford. Telecoms may not make the mainstream headlines as part of the discussions, but it will certainly feature in the debate. "Information technologies contribute two-three per cent of global greenhouse emissions," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva in October. "But it can also reduce emissions in other sectors by at least 15 per cent."

In the UK, the climate question will become even more pressing for IT directors in the enterprise when new legislation for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), including carbon accounting and reduction strategies, will begin to come into force in April next year for the largest 5,000 companies. Confusion over the bill and the practicability and effectiveness of the 'cap and trade' practices mean that many enterprises are still unprepared for its ramifications, presenting an opportunity for resellers to open discussions now.

Whether or not large enterprises are successfully preparing for CSR, the message that improving environmental efficiency complements rather than counters cost saving strategies is raising its profile in financing discussions. Britain may still be in the grip of the longest recession of modern times, but that hasn't stopped environmental considerations returning to the decision making process for enterprise telecoms. "Customers really want to hear about cost savings now," says Juliet Silvester, Head of Environmental Programmes at Fujitsu. "Especially when they help them reach environmental objectives."

Programmes designed to improve carbon efficiency need to take into account implementation issues as well as technical ones. Employees often need more than a new set of guidelines to adopt new working practices, and solutions need to be discussed during the planning phases with a client. Silvester, for example, claims that her company has reduced energy consumption by 19 per cent over the last two years. Unified communications and videoconferencing have a vital role to play in Fujitsu's strategy, but changing employee behaviour has required more than simply making the technology available.

"We're a technology company," says Silvester. "So we say to our staff... 'use the technology before you travel'. We've introduced travel application forms which have to be submitted through quite a bureaucratic process, which is deliberately made difficult, to make employees explain why they can't use technology to hold a meeting rather than travel."

The benefits are worthwhile, Silvester argues, since a 10 per cent reduction in travel costs equates to £6.5 million a year for the company, and the equivalent CO2 production of a power station for 2,000 homes. One area that will become increasingly important for telecoms resellers as PBXs migrate to software solutions, for example, is the question of server and data centre design. Mitel, thanks to a partnership with VMware, can now virtualise phone systems for first time. This, it's claimed, will reduce the number of servers, and therefore energy required. Another technology which could directly benefit server-based IP-PBXs is solid state storage, using the Flash-based memory familiar from camera storage cards to replace hard disks. "Solid state drives use massively less power than traditional hard drives," explains Chris Atkins, Head of Product and Partner Marketing at Sun Microsystems, "Typically it delivers 100 times the I/O operations at a fifth of the power."