I think the issue that IT and technology will be key to tackling climate change is well recognised. But what exactly this means for governments, organisations, and individuals isn't really understood. There's lots of "green IT" initiatives out there. What needs to be done is sift through the gimmicks and expose the true game changers. The take up on the low hanging fruit which deliver short term returns is under way but is nearing saturation in terms of benefit gained. The game changers will obviously be the longer term initiatives which make economic as well as climate sense. The challenge lies in identifying which ones are appropriate for whom. There is no one size fits all!

I couldn't agree more. Politics and talk is all fine but the bottom line is that we need the mechanisms to deliver profound change. Regulation alone is incabable to produce the results (don't go far, look at the market melt-down) and IT can provide a major (if not THE) platform to do this. Informed decision making, avoiding the pitfalls of the past and establishing a new culture of responsibility and respect for the finite resources and the impact of our lifestyle to others in our networked society can only be supported by IT. But IT that is carefully delivered and 'blended' into our urban environments in ways that maximise the opportunity for impact.

Let's try a bold claim...the aspirations we are quite rightly setting for ourselves in terms of sustainable, liveable cities into the 21st century are simply unattianable without the ability to harness the power and potential of the new digital platforms and the services and capabiities they provision. Smart grids, clever buildings, traffic management and public transport systems capable of real time configuration to reflect, and respond to, changes in demand, new patterns of work and mobility across and within urban spaces, new cultural experiences that give form and voice to the lives of citizens and their communities...the list goes on and on. None of them will happen without the ability to create, store, move, access and adapt information and knowledge often in real time and always in ever-widening networks of people and organisations. What we are witnessing is an unprecedented shift in the relationship between people and the urban fabric of which they have become such an integral part...and all increasingly mediated if not exclusively then certainly predominantly by new digital spaces and tools. Two implications flow from this claim, assuming we are happy with its basic direction. One is that the business of conceiving and designing and 'delivering' cities will change completely. if you assume, from the start, the kind of pervasive connectedness which the digital world is already provisioning, then you will confront the design and building and maintanance of cities quite differently. Where you decide people will live and work, how you assume they will connect between the two, where they will recreate, where they shop and go to school...all of those decisions are potentially quite different in a world of dense connection and reliable, real-broadband enabled communication.The second implication is new forms of governance. How you connect citizens to the business of policy making, decisions about investments and the rest will also have to change. This will be tough because the connected world operates according to an essentially horizontal, networked logic, unlike the traditional world of urban management and governance which operates according to an essentially vertical, 'ego' driven logic of hierarchy and silo. It will be fun - and occaisonally painful I suspect - to watch these two worlds, the world of networks and the world of ego-driven hierarchies, collide and learn to accommodate each other as new forms of urban governance evolve to match the new reality of connected cities...

Much of the information relating to energy consumption and climate change should be freely available. Much of the data that the government have should be in the public domain, but they don't know how to enable this.Creating large centralised systems to manage all the potential information is to create a behemoth - such beasts usually collapse under their own weight. Nobody in the web2 world does that nowadays anyway. Many of the pieces of technology users want already exist through the work buildings engineers, energy companies, environmental and research organisations have been carrying out, solving their own piece of the problem...but not talking to each other.Perhaps 'house hackers' should be the inspiration for the sort of approach that will persist independently of vested interest. They have been crying out for shared data and an open standards approach so that they can improve their own home network projects. There's probably not going to be one particular 'game changer', but any constructor who seizes the opportunity to provide free access to some really useful information will earn the right to influence the underlying standards that enable the 'internet of things'.