Ericsson maintains high climate ranking

Greenpeace has given Ericsson a third-place ranking in its latest Cool IT Leaderboard evaluation of global IT players. This means the company maintains its position from last year, and has even managed to improve its overall result.

"We have been working with climate and energy issues for over a decade, and we are pleased to be recognized by Greenpeace once again for leadership in this area," says Elaine Weidman-Grunewald, Ericsson’s Vice President and Head of Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility. "Greenpeace has understood the impact the ICT sector can have on climate change, and we need more organizations and policy makers to understand this in the future, in order to realize the full potential ICT can bring to sustainability."

The Greenpeace Cool IT Leaderboard is a yearly ranking that evaluates global IT companies on their leadership efforts to influence governments to drive change in the energy sector to reduce the production of carbon emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change. A total of 21 companies are featured in this year’s rankings, each evaluated in three categories:

Climate Solutions – efforts to provide economy-wide climate solutions
IT Energy Impact – efforts to reduce emissions from their own operations
Political Advocacy – efforts to lobby for science-based climate and energy policies.
Ericsson scored a total of 51 points, three more than last year. The company’s highest score was in the Climate Solutions category; here, Ericsson has been praised by Greenpeace for its strong methodology in measuring the impact of its IT energy savings, and for its real-world case studies of IT solutions. Even so, Greenpeace has identified areas of improvement for Ericsson.

“We will continue to engage and communicate in this area – not only regarding our long-term goals but also our performance – and this year we met our five-year carbon footprint intensity target one year early,” Weidman-Grunewald says. "We will continue to work hard to visualize the connection between our IT solutions to real-world policy outcomes by national governments."

This is the sixth edition of the Cool IT Leaderboard.

Top 10 in the Cool IT Leaderboard rankings for 2013:

Ranking
1) Cisco
2) Google
3) Ericsson
4) Fujitsu
5) Sprint
6) Wipro
7) HP
8) IBM
9) Alcatel-Lucent
10) Vodafone
Points
58
58
51
44
43
43
43
40
40
40