[LINK] CDM Applications

[Tom Worthington]

At 10:47 PM 31/12/2008, Tom Koltai wrote:
>... Has anyone on Link filed a CDM (UNFCC) or know anyone that has. ...

A Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), under Article 12 of the  Kyoto 
Protocol allows a developed country, such as Australia, to implement 
an emission-reduction project in a developing country: 
<http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/mechanisms/clean_development_mechanism/items/2718.php>.

The incentive is that the reduction in the developed nation can be 
sold to a developed nation and counted towards their Kyoto target.

Using email in place of paper newsletters might count for a CDM. But 
you would need to be able to demonstrate that this reduces emissions 
in specific developing countries.

Eliminating paper does not necessarily reduce greenhouse gasses. At 
the Symposium on Sustainability of the Internet and ICT in November 
2008 http://www.ee.unimelb.edu.au/green_internet/the_symposium.html> 
one comment was that Telstra's e-billing only reduced carbon, if the 
servers were heavily loaded. If the servers were lightly loaded, then 
they generated more greenhouse gasses than delivering paper bills did.

Note that reductions in developed countries, such as Australia, do 
not count for CDMs, but might be considered a "domestic abatement 
project" as defined in the Australian Draft National Carbon Offset Standard.

I have been studying up on this stuff, to teach in a Green ICT 
course: <http://tomw.net.au/moodle/course/view.php?id=11>.

Perhaps I could get the students to work up an application for a 
domestic abatement project based on reducing the size of email 
messages and web pages. ;-)

It should not be difficult achieve a 50% reduction in the size of web 
pages served. The hard part would be showing that this resulted in a 
reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. It may make a real reduction 
on a heavily loaded server, which would not need as many disks and 
processing power to handle the reduced data. Removing a load from an 
already lightly loaded server would not greatly reduce energy use and 
therefore not reduce CO2E emissions.

ps: The ACS Green ICT course starts 18 January 2009 
<http://www.acs.org.au/cpeprogram/index.cfm?action=show&conID=greenict>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University