This month's Computing Business polls IT directors about how technology leaders and the government can help cut spiralling carbon emissions. Suggestions are mixed, as I will discuss at a later date.

But some businesses are already taking a strong stance, as outlined by Computing Business advisory board member JP Rangaswami, chief information officer at BT Global Services. Here's what JP had to say about his organisation's progress towards slashing carbon emissions:

BT is engaged in an ongoing drive to reduce its carbon footprint, using innovative technology to improve environmental sustainability. BT has already reduced emissions by 60 per cent between 1996 and 2006, and now aims to extend that reduction to 80 per cent by 2016 ­ the equivalent annual carbon emissions produced by 143,000 cars.

We began the project with an assessment of 90 legacy data centres. Combined, these data centres had 11,000 server racks powered by an average of 3,000 watts per rack and 25,000 physical servers. By using leading-edge technologies such as fresh air cooling, improved efficiency in energy transfer from the street to the data centre and virtualisation technologies, BT has saved £3.8m in electricity costs in nine months.

BT has also reduced overall power consumption by one per cent. Although this may sound small, BT consumes approximately 0.8 per cent of the total power in the UK and is one of the largest buyers of green electricity on the planet. BT’s data centre initiative reduces power consumption, reduces the amount of capital deployed in building data centres and improves resiliency by simplifying the power distribution systems.

Such initiatives illustrate how progress towards sustainability can be quickly achieved. But at a more general level, there is still much work to be done - with analyst Gartner recently reporting the world's data centres are responsible for the same volume of carbon emissions as the average European country.