Nearly 70 per cent of UK businesses have no target to reduce their carbon footprint, despite 90 per cent saying that tackling the environmental efficiency of IT systems is core to an overall green strategy, according to research by the Green Technology Initiative.

The survey suggests that businesses are paying lip service to green issues but failing to take action.

'What we are doing in IT today is not sustainable. Systems efficiency is the cheapest and easiest way of reducing the carbon footprint of the work you do but many UK enterprises lack the incentive, knowledge and resources to make immediate changes,' said Dan Sutherland, founder and acting chair of the Green Technology Initiative.

IT departments are not even measuring their own efficiency. Some 95 per cent of respondents to the survey do not know how efficient their IT systems are because they have no measurement, and 79 per cent do not link power costs to hardware spending or IT budgets, which means they don't think about the cost of power.

Over 50 per cent of respondents have no policies in place for turning off unused equipment, and of those that had many had only just begun the process.

Sutherland says the overwhelming majority of those surveyed are relying on vendors, hardware manufacturers and government to get them and the country on target to reduce CO2 emissions by 20 per cent per cent before 2010.

'2010 is not far away and IT accounts for a significant amount of greenhouse emissions, so now is the time to take greater responsibility and tackle IT energy consumption, but business is clearly not getting the help and support it needs to take that responsibility,' he said.