Introduction

Practitioners in library and information services have been increasingly dealing with digital documents and databases. With the invention and adoption of the internet and web technologies the volume of information has significantly increased over the past two decades. These new technologies have opened up many hitherto unforeseen opportunities that have facilitated an unprecedented growth in the creation and use of digital content and data. However, the internet, web, various information systems and services, and underlying ICT infrastructure and computing devices make extensive use of energy and consequently generate a substantial amount of GHG.

Chapters 1 and 2 described how environmental sustainability has become a major matter of concern in discussions at institutional, regional, national and international level about how to encourage businesses and departments to reduce GHG emissions. Chapter 2 gave examples of some of the definitions of GHG – generally it is measured as the equivalent of CO2 emissions, expressed in metric tonnes of CO2 or mTCO2e.

Although environmental sustainability issues are addressed in almost every business sector, studies show that very little research has been carried out on environmental sustainability in the information services sector (Chowdhury, 2012). Since ICT forms the basis of today's information systems and services, some relevant lessons can be learnt from related areas, especially green IT research.

Chapter 2 noted that although there are many different challenges and indicators involved, climate change issues, measured in GHG emissions, are often used as one of the major indicators of environmental sustainability. This chapter explains the concept of GHG as discussed in many authoritative documents and reports, especially in an IPCC report (2007a). It then considers the concepts of green IT and green information systems research, pointing out the major difficulties of measuring GHG emissions from ICT and tools. It brief ly looks at the lifecycle analysis technique used to measure GHG for IT and information services and examines whether and how such a technique can be used to measure GHG emissions from information systems and services.

The IPCC report and GHG emissions

Since its inception in 1988 the IPCC has produced four multi-volume assessment reports on different aspects of climate change. The Fourth Assess - ment Report (AR4) of the IPCC was published in 2007, and the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), with contributions from more than 800 international experts, will appear in 2014 (IPCC, 2013).