One remarkable news in 2009 was the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) held in Copenhagen. Although many were disappointed with COP15's main output, the summit did introduce a new kind of dynamics in global climate policy, in addition to the Copenhagen accord. Specifically, considering the climate change all over the planet, we must pay close attention to this severe situation and take action as soon as possible. Under this new trend, all organizations, even households and individuals, are expected to set their agendas to manage their carbon
footprint (CFP) below a certain level in the near future. This new practice needs appropriate IT systems to help tackle challenges in measuring, analyzing and managing carbon emissions in a cost-effective manner . Currently, several carbon management systems are being developed to facilitate enterprises to calculate and manage their CFP, such as ESS's GHG/Carbon management SolutionTM , U.S. Army's Enviance system ,IBM/EIM's GreenCertTM, etc. However, their IT architectures are less efficient compared to the latest IT technologies. In addition, a number of CFP tools are being developed to fulfill households and individuals’ carbon
related needs, such as UK Carbon Footprint Ltd's CFP calculator , the Nature Conservancy's CFP calculator , etc. These CFP tools are based on B/S model, and it can only calculate user's CFP over the Internet. Therefore, it is still a challenging issue on how to take advantage of the latest IT technologies to improve carbon systems.We focus on the next-generation carbon systems for both enterprises and households use and present a carbon 2.0 framework based on cloud computing. This new framework is massively scalable and can dynamically configure/deliver
carbon-related services on demand. Moreover, it is a real low-carbon framework itself!
The term "carbon 2.0" was first introduced by Qindong Liu and Jan Stallaert, who attempted to unveil the architecture and functionality of future carbon systems for enterprises. Cloud computing is a new computing paradigm and it can make good use of
economies of scale, and dynamically deliver almost any IT related resources as a service on demand, such as computing power, storage capacity, network service, integrated management, with dynamically configurable interface and the economy model of charging for capacity.
