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Software consultancy TG Allison, for example, which helps dairy farmers in rural Wales maximize their milk yields, has cut average weekly mileage by its employees from 200 down to 40 miles — an 80% drop — at the same time as increasing productivity and customer satisfaction. Instead of spending hours driving out to a client’s farm whenever something goes wrong, the company’s staff now use an Internet link to connect to the farm’s computers and resolve the problem, often within minutes. Many farmers are also pleased to know the company has reduced its carbon emissions, says owner Thomas Allison.

FTSE said that it has teamed up with cleantech-focused investment firm Impax to launch a new index dedicated to tracking investments in alternative energy and energy efficiency, water treatment and pollution control, and waste technologies and resource management.

Meanwhile, NASDAQ OMX Group said last week that it was to introduce a series of Carbon indices designed to both underpin derivatives trading and provide a benchmark for the global carbon market. The company said that the new indices would make it easier for investors to enter the carbon market and gain an accurate picture of how their investments are performing.

The CEOs of 100 large multinational corporations -- including companies from carbon-intense industries -- have signed a World Economic Forum statement [PDF] that calls on the G8 to create a strategy to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 50 percent by 2050.

India's top firms face little stakeholder pressure to combat climate change with only about 40 per cent of the companies surveyed setting voluntary carbon emissions reduction goals, a report said. A survey by KPMG consultants of 70 CEOs found their response to climate issues was driven largely by the need to comply with expected regulations, while leaving the leadership role in tackling global warming to the government.

While many companies in the developed world have measured their baseline carbon footprint and set reduction targets over 5-10 years, in India only 41 per cent of firms had some qualified reduction goals to be achieved by 2010. About 38 per cent had no such goals.

THE powerful Group of Eight developed nations have taken a cautious step towards a new global climate change deal, agreeing to a goal of at least halving world carbon emissions by 2050.

Garnaut describes a few categories of economic modelling: The first category is ‘conventional market economic effects’, things you can measure and have data for. The scond category is ‘things you can measure and model but for which you have no real data’. Tourism falls into this category and so his core model excludes tourism for now. The third category is ‘things we value but that fall outside conteporary economic models’, things such as the Great Barrier Reef, which, when we lose them forever there’ll be a national sense of mourning. He emphasised that the numbers only tell a story in category one, tell a made up story in category two, and tell no story at all in category three.

REDUCING carbon emissions will not be cost free for Australians, Kevin Rudd has bluntly declared, as he turns the heat on the Liberals to pass the Government's scheme in the Senate next year.

Well it's hardly a surprise but the Government's green paper tells us an emissions trading scheme will be costly.It will be inflationary and could push the price of electricity up by as much as 16 per cent. But to ease the pain, the Government has promised compensation for pensioners, motorists and low income households; and assistance for high emitting businesses.The Greens aren't happy, and neither is the Opposition. But the broad outlines of the Governments design to reduce carbon pollution has been welcomed by the business community.

IBM can then assist clients in a range of CSR areas, including: -- Carbon footprint analysis and management; -- Environmental procurement; -- CSR policy development and monitoring for suppliers; -- "Green" data center; -- Information sharing and engagement with customers, shareholders, regulators and advocacy groups; -- Linking philanthropy to corporate strategy; -- Diversity and labor practices; -- Engagement with employees on CSR.

Only 36 per cent of the senior executives surveyed were aware the federal government's carbon trading scheme will kick into action in 2010, the Australian Institute of Management, Victoria and Tasmania, (AIM) survey found. Eighty per cent of respondents said they knew very little or were only somewhat aware of the scheme.

"The whole idea of carbon pricing is that if it doesn't hurt it won't work," he told Canberra ABC radio today. "Essentially, prices, for example for petrol as well as a whole bunch of other things, have to go up in order to encourage us to be more careful with how much we use and in order to encourage business to come up with new ways of getting it to us in ways that don't pump out greenhouse gases."

Apple's new iPhone 3G will be shipped on July 11 in a potato starch paper tray. Apple placed an order with Dutch company PaperFoam, which also makes packages for Motorola.

Arentsen doesn't want to reveal too many details, but says the iPhone will be delivered in a cardboard box with a starch tray (the inner part of the box), which is fully recyclable. The company claims a carbon footprint reduction of 90 per cent compared to plastic. The product consists of 100 per cent natural resource, either potato starch or Tapioca starch.

That is changing with the company’s relatively new corporate environmental site. One big shift in the past six months has been the focus on software as a means of controlling or affecting carbon footprints. The potential for analytics and management technology that helps businesses run scenarios to better plan around emissions, geographic concerns and data center limitations suddenly seems boundless. The other big transition that Microsoft faces, of course, is the Software as a Service (SaaS) movement, which will see its data center footprint mushroom extensively in the coming years.

This report applies a full-cost economics approach to climate change adaptation, using the aluminium industry as a case study to illustrate the complexity of the policy challenge. The report examines the positive value of jobs within the upstream aluminium industry, and the negative value of carbon emissions from the sector. It estimates the value which flows from aluminium jobs to individual workers and to the wider community. The report provides a demographic survey of aluminium towns and finds that aluminium towns are less economically vibrant than the Australian economy as a whole, with lower median incomes (despite high aluminium wages), lower employment and lower workforce participation. This highlights the critical importance of aluminium to these towns, employing thousands of local workers at an average wage more than double the national median.