The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has completed a green IT refresh that will become the template for all government departments.

The success of the Defra scheme ­ which covered some 10,000 civil servants ­ will be an indicator of how far the government’s overall green IT strategy can reduce the public sector’s carbon footprint.

Chris Chant ­ the ex-chief information officer (CIO) at Defra, who has now moved to be CIO of the Government Olympic Executive ­ believes the scheme should succeed.

“The Defra strategy has delivered many benefits to the department and I’m hoping these will translate across government,” he said.

The wider government strategy aims to have IT carbon neutral across its lifecycle by 2020. Although Defra is not quite there yet, it hopes to be soon.

The Defra strategy has a number of components. Central to it is a decision to fund centrally only one computer per employee ­ either a thin-client desktop or a laptop.

That has taken the department from an average of 1.4 machines per employee to a recently achieved target of 1.01.

The desktop rollout has replaced thousands of old power-hungry monitors with low-energy flat screens.

The move to replace desktop stations with laptops has saved on power use ­ the laptops use 70 per cent less power than the old desktops ­ and helped cut employee travel.

“We have got down to an occupancy rate of 50 per cent from a rate that was sometimes over 100 per cent in Defra’s headquarters, giving us far more space in what was a crowded workplace,” said Chant.

The cost of the refresh was covered by Defra’s existing IT services contract with IBM.

The vendor has also been using virtualisation in the department’s datacentres and consolidated 120 servers down to 12.

Although Defra does not yet have any figures on how the scheme has reduced its carbon footprint, all these moves have been translated to the wider government green IT strategy and are currently being implemented around Whitehall.

This wider strategy is a key part of reducing the carbon footprint of the public sector in the UK.

The target for the central government office estate is to achieve carbon neutrality by 2012.