Climate Change

Company information

Key points

• HP recognizes that climate change is one of the most serious environmental and economic challenges facing the world today, and that mitigating its effects must be one of the top priorities of governments, companies, NGOs and individuals.
• HP’s comprehensive climate change strategy encompasses a broad range of actions from reducing its own operations carbon footprint, minimizing the impact of its products on the climate, innovating to develop new solutions that will help reduce the carbon footprint of the overall economy, and exerting its influence to facilitate policies and develop standards that support and drive a rapid transition to a low-carbon economy.

	The issue

Our planet’s climate is changing, and greenhouse gases (GHG) are the main culprit. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007 shows that unmitigated climate change would likely trigger a range of environmental problems that would impact agriculture, natural habitats and many communities in low-lying coastal areas. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change published in 2006 also finds that the potential costs of responding and adapting to unmitigated climate change could rise up to between 5 percent and 20 percent of global GDP each year, putting global economic growth and development at risk; while mitigating climate change would cost around 1 percent of GDP each year.

Governments across the globe are working with the private sector to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses which are a primary cause of climate change, through improving the energy efficiency of economies, avoiding deforestation, and switching to less carbon intensive energy sources.

	HP’s position

HP recognizes that the costs of adapting to unmitigated climate change will likely far outweigh the costs of slowing it down, per the Stern report. HP believes it is in both society’s and business’ interests to limit global temperature increase to 2°C from pre-industrial levels by the end of this century in order to avoid the most severe environmental, social and economic impacts of climate change.

HP supports policies that facilitate the transition to a low-carbon economy. HP believes that the IT industry has both a responsibility to limit the carbon footprint of IT equipment, and the opportunity to facilitate the reduction of carbon emissions across many sectors of the overall economy.

As global efforts to tackle the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are the main cause of climatechange gain even more momentum, HP continues to collaborate with our customers, governments, NGOs and investors to address the issue. Further, we support the development and promotion of climate change policies through our participation in several local and global organizations. HP is actively working with WWF Climate Savers, Combat Climate Change, the International Partnership on Climate Change and the Pew Center for Global Climate Change to define effective policies to contain climate change and protect society and the global economy from serious impacts.

HP believes there are a few key principles that should guide a climate change mitigation strategy, including:

• Policy frameworks that use market-based mechanisms to set clear, transparent and consistent price signals over the long term offer the best hope for unleashing needed innovation and competition.
• Efforts must be global but differentiated – developing countries have a legitimate aspiration to development which must be taken into account in global policies. HP supports approaches that create incentives and encourage actions by all countries, including large emitting economies in the developing world, to implement GHG emission reduction strategies
• HP believes IT solutions can help all countries, and particularly developing economies which are building their infrastructure from the ground up, achieve rapid economic development with a lower dependency on fossil fuels.
• Climate change mitigation must not be viewed in isolation from other highly important challenges, such as ensuring access to energy, expanding availability of clean water, alleviating poverty, and achieving growth in the global economy.
• Undertaking a system-wide, integrated approach to the problem and its solutions is critically important – to identify where greatest leverage exists for mitigation from the beginning of the production cycle through to users and end-of-use.

HP recognizes that climate policies also need to include plans and actions for adaptation to climate change. Science indicates that greenhouse gas emissions over the past decades have already committed the world to a certain amount of climate change. It is important to prepare for these changes and minimize the impacts they will have on the global society and economy.

	Impact on HP

As the world’s largest IT company, HP’s greatest impact on the environment is through our products. HP is committed to providing products and services that are environmentally sound throughout their life cycles. Environmental impacts occur at every stage of the product life cycle: from product design, through manufacturing and transport, to use by customers and, finally, reuse and recycling at the end of a product’s use.

Managing these impacts is a complex challenge as well as an opportunity. We apply design expertise to create innovative products and services with reduced environmental impact. For example, flat panel displays, notebooks, multi-function handhelds and all-in-one printers use less material and are more energy-efficient than the desktop PCs and individual scan, fax, copy and print devices they replace for many customers. These newer products help reduce energy consumption, GHG emissions and space/weight used in transport, all of which result in lower environmental impact. HP ensures environmental design does not compromise other product requirements such as quality, reliability and price.

HP recognizes that its own operations are also at risk from climate change: HP facilities and supply chain could be subject to increased incidence of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods associated with climate change. Power shortages and blackouts could interrupt our operations or those of our suppliers, distributors and customers.

HP and environmental sustainability: Learn about HP's commitment to the environment, including recycling programs, responsible product design, clean operations, energy efficient products and solutions, and more on HP’s environmental web site.

HP actions and outlook

1. Reporting: HP is reporting its greenhouse gas emissions through several channels:
   • HP was one of the first companies to join the WEF Global Greenhouse Gas Register to report, track and improve emissions and set improvement targets.
   • HP has been reporting through the Carbon Disclosure Project since its inception, and was named “Best in Class” (with a perfect score in climate change) in 2007.
2. WWF: In November 2006, HP and World Wildlife Fund-US (WWF-US) announced a joint initiative to reduce HP’s greenhouse gas emissions from its operating facilities worldwide, educate and inspire others to adopt best practices, and use HP technology in conservation efforts around the world. The projects include:
   • HP to define ambitious targets to reduce the energy consumption from its operations and products:
     1. By 2010, HP will reduce carbon dioxide emissions from HP-owned and HP-leased facilities worldwide to 16 percent below their 2005 levels.
     2. By 2010, HP will reduce the combined energy consumption and customer associated GHG emissions of its operations and products by 25% below their 2005 levels by the year 2010
   • HP to report and verify carbon dioxide emissions from its facilities, based on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the World Economic Forum’s Global Greenhouse Gas Registry.
   • WWF-US and HP to define and implement educational efforts to address climate change with key stakeholders and highlight best practices adopted by consumers and businesses.
   • WWF-US and HP to leverage HP technology to advance the science and practice of adapting and becoming resilient to climate change. An initial project involves funding from HP to study the effects of climate change on the wildlife and habitats of North America’s Bering Sea.
   • Find out more about HP’s joint initiative with WWF at www.hp.com/go/wwf
3. Energy efficient products:
   • HP is an original partner of the ENERGY STAR program, a globally recognized voluntary program to design and promote products that save energy while maintaining product performance. HP has numerous ENERGY STAR qualified products. See www.hp.com/go/energy for more information.
   • HP was the first PC manufacturer to register an Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT™) Gold product with the HP Compaq rp5700 Long Lifecycle Business Desktop PC in 2007, and is continuing to introduce many new products that are registered at either the Gold or Silver rating levels.
   • HP is a board member of Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI), which brings together businesses, consumers and conservation organizations. CSCI works to make new PCs and servers more energy efficient and to promote power management to minimize energy consumption when computers are inactive.
4. Our operations:
   • HP is consolidating its 85 legacy data centers into 6 data centers in three cities, each equipped with the latest energy-efficient equipment and Dynamic Smart Cooling technology. When the initiative is complete and fully optimized, we anticipate yearly energy savings from data center consolidation up to 380 million kWh, and annual cost savings of up to US$30 million.
   • HP is optimizing the use of office space in order to save costs and reduce the environmental footprint associated with real estate. HP now owns and leases less space than we did a year ago, even as our business grew. We decommissioned 179 sites around the world in 2007, yielding a net reduction of 2.9 million square feet (269,400 square meters), or 5.7 percent of our total space.
   • We are upgrading HP facilities with the latest energy efficient HP technology. For example, we are replacing cathode ray tube monitors with flat-panel displays and relying more on notebook PCs in temporary office spaces. Over time, we expect the more energy efficient monitors and notebooks to reduce energy use by more than 4 million kilowatt hours (kWh) per year, saving approximately 2,000 tonnes of CO₂e and about $320,000.
   • o HP is continuing to reduce paper waste in our office printing environment. We’re currently implementing duplex printing as standard across the company, using HP Web JetAdmin and Universal Print Driver to configure printers. This technology is helping us to achieve our goal for 80 percent of general office printing and copying to be double-sided by the end of 2008, saving HP up to 726 metric tonnes of paper a year and $7.7 million.
5. Research and Development: HP Labs is researching new ways to increase the energy efficiency of our products from the chip, to handheld devices, personal computers and printers and servers and data centers.
   • HP Labs announced in March 08 a refocused research agenda, with sustainability being one of 5 focus areas: Creating technologies, IT infrastructure and new business models for the lower carbon economy that save money and leave a lighter footprint on the environment.

¹ Throughout this document, “greenhouse gas” or “GHG” refers to all greenhouse gases emitted by human activities, and “CO2e” refers to “carbon dioxide equivalent”, the unit used to measure greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main, but not the only man-made greenhouse gas.

² IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (http://www.ipcc.ch/)

³Goal applies to average energy consumption across identified high volume product families, using industry standard measurement benchmarks and holding ship rates constant using IDC reported figures for 2005. Identified product families include products in the following categories: notebook and desktop computers, inkjet and LaserJet printers and industry standard servers.