IT trade body Intellect has this week announced a raft of measures to help tackle the industry's burgeoning carbon footprint, including plans for as new project to help firms measure their ICT-related carbon emissions.

The group said it was teaming up with the University of Warwick to develop a standardised mechanism for quantifying ICT-related emissions, as well as a new web-based tool which will allow users to compare the effectiveness of various green IT products.

The announcements were made at the launch of a major new whitepaper from Intellect detailing how the IT sector – which is often criticised as a major consumer of energy and is estimated to generate two per cent of the world's carbon emissions – can both improve its energy efficiency and help improve the environmental performance to other sectors of the economy.

Entitled High Tech: Low Carbon, the report outlines 26 different technology areas where the ICT industry can help firms cut their carbon output, ranging from video conferencing to innovations in fields such as engineering and biotechnology.

Intellect director general John Higgins argued that the IT sector was hugely committed to meeting the UK's emission reduction target and had a major role to play in the transition to a low carbon economy. "It should be clear that the technology sector is embracing the challenge of energy efficiency and is producing better, faster, lighter devices that use less and less energy as the result of a continuous process of intensive research and development," he said.

The report follows the recent Intellect's recent launch of a new green IT working group involving senior executives from a raft of the UK's largest IT firms, including Microsoft, IBM, Dell HP and Accenture.

Graham Palmer, chairman of the new group and Intel country manager, insisted that such industry-wide co-operation was essential if the sector was to deliver standardised approaches for enhancing energy efficiency. "To do that through Intellect will have a greater community impact than to try and do that alone," he argued.

A version of this article first appeared at BusinessGreen's sister site IT Week