Mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting and the emergence of carbon-trading schemes are fuelling a rush to implement emissions reporting packages. Energy efficiency consultant Groom Energy forecasts a five-fold increase in global adoption of enterprise carbon accounting software by 2011.

Businesses are turning to these packages to control the emissions management process, using them to handle aggregation, accounting, analysis and reporting of their energy and CO2 emissions data (although GHG reporting requirements differ across regions and verticals). That data will also allow investors and customers to make ethical decisions about the organisations they want to deal with.

As many as 60 carbon accounting software vendors currently play the field. Groom Energy reports that specialists such as Enviance (used by FujiFilm and agri-business Syngenta) and Hara Software (adopted by Coca-Cola and US supermarket chain Safeway) compete alongside the more familiar SAP, CA and SAS. Packages vary, but Verdantix, another consultancy in the sector, identifies emissions calculation engines, energy data aggregation, in-built analytics and multi-regime reporting as the must-have features.

To date, vendors have targeted risk officers, general counsel and finance directors with their applications, often delivered on-demand from the cloud. But there is a clear role for CIOs too, as the IT organisation is ideally placed to recommend solutions that best support the long-term commitments needed for carbon reduction.

Without IT's input, organisations are likely to run into problems with data integration, or be left with a system that does not scale or is difficult to audit. They will also find it doubly difficult to comply with rules such as the World Business Council's Sustainable Development GHG protocol, or to produce benchmarks for energy-hungry assets such as servers, manufacturing facilities and temperature control units.