Not so in Asia. Apart from occasional grandstanding, Asian businesses have said little and done less about climate change.

 

Recent industry surveys of green IT adoption confirm this. A Gartner poll early this year found that just 15% of Asian firms had plans to launch green IT projects in the near-future, compared to 40% of US and 58% of European companies.

 

 

A more recent survey of Hong Kong IT professionals show they are well behind their North American counterparts in dealing with carbon emissions and other green issues.

 

The study, commissioned by the newly-formed Green ICT Consortium, found 42% of Hong Kong companies had neither a green IT strategy nor any plan to implement one, compared with 35 in the US and Canada. In Hong Kong just 38% of firms are implementing such a strategy, compared with 81% in North America. And while every North American company surveyed had a green IT budget, 30% of Hong Kong firms had none at all.

 

The consortium said the survey showed the city was at the “early stage” of green IT adoption. But it reveals that Hong Kong, despite its self-proclaimed “world city” title, falls well short of world benchmarks in dealing with climate change.

 

One element lacking is government leadership. Elizabeth Quat, one of the founders of the new association, said the government’s role was central – not only was it the territory’s biggest ICT consumer, but it also laid out plans to build a “low-carbon economy.”

 

“The one missing link in the strategy is ICT,” she said. “I’ve had discussions with our Finance Secretary and the Chief Secretary. They never think that IT can be part of the way to reduce carbon emissions. It’s not in their minds at all. So we need to do a lot of lobbying.”

 

 

The government could take easy steps, she said. For example, by cutting on paper waste by eliminating the thick wad of press clippings distributed every morning, or the huge paper load required of legislators, said Quat, who is a member of the Shatin district council in Hong Kong.

 

While Asian governments dither, the global green IT bandwagon rolls on. In an analysis of the topic for the World Economic Forum, consultancy Accenture said carbon metrics “should become a fundamental part of performance metrics” for corporate boardrooms.

 

Looking forward, Simon Mingay, a Gartner research vice-president, said 2010 would be a year in which the “green IT adopters slow down, and the pack starts to catch up.”

 

“For those at the front, they will reach the end of Green IT phase 1 having grasped most of the low hanging fruit, the easy, the obvious and things with a relatively short ROI,” he told Enterprise Innovation.  

 

That said, there remained “plenty to do” for most enterprises in Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore and other parts of the region.

 

But he said green IT phase 2 wouldn’t get going “until the price of electricity takes another jump upwards and we start to see carbon pricing coming into play.”