When it comes to IT sustainability, the present economic uncertainty and political swings from diametrically opposite policies regarding climate change present a significant challenge to IT leaders. They require a technology roadmap to navigate these turbulent times robust enough to adapt to economic and political volatility.Sujata Kukreja, general counsel and chief compliance officer at network management platform Expereo, urges tech leaders to manage sustainability with innovation and take into consideration the running costs of inefficient datacentres. We have to invest money and we are very conscious of datacentre energy consumption, she says.Expereo therefore continues to prioritise emissions reduction, even if its costly. The procurement team increasingly seeks renewables-based arrangements. Its about having a longer-term focus, especially with artificial intelligence (AI) tools coming in, says Kukreja. But our investors are not going to continue if were not a business with purpose.Another company that expects to continue to focus on emissions reduction and science-based targets despite economic pressures worsening in the past year is Crown Worldwide. Chris Davis-Pipe, chief information officer at the global logistics firm, commands a 70-strong enterprise IT team with 3,000 staff across business units in some 50 countries.Were working to get more visibility of the carbon were using and how to turn things off when we dont want to use them, says Davis-Pipe. We stick solar on warehouses, were looking at using more renewable electricity, then were also moving from our own datacentres to more cloud-based services.Customers increasingly demand information on emissions reduction, including a plan with science-based goals and demonstrable progress. Crowns carbon-accounting platform has been calculating its carbon footprint, with 66% of estimated emissions accounted for by the end of 2023. It doesnt plan to roll back the strategy, but it is buying more software and services off the shelf. In the past, it would have built its own. In-house IT skills have refocused on integration and data analytics, he says.Crown has also given countries and branches more leeway to improve IT environments locally for instance, to achieve agility or efficiency within a governance framework. We have core systems main service delivery and financial systems globally, but were much more open now for people to solve local issues locally, Davis-Pipe explains.Automation and AI beyond Copilot content in marketing are also areas where the company is alert to future use cases that support the business and its net-zero goals, he says.Many firms may be in a similar position.Sarwar Khan, sustainability director at BT Group, reports that the company and many of its partners and customers are doubling down on net zero despite various pressures.I sit in the business arm, with support for SMB [small and mid-sized business] customers, public sector, wholesale including channel partners. And the pressure to reduce [environmental] impact is not going away, Khan confirms. Its a key priority.While smaller businesses have serious concerns in terms of how theyre going to be sustainable and comply with net zero by 2050, theyre not backing off despite increasingly realising its an enormous task. Meanwhile, more specific key performance indicators (KPIs) on carbon, often revised quarterly, are appearing in the public sector. The pressure to reduce [environmental] impact is not going away. Its a key priority Sarwar Khan, BT GroupSMBs are looking to big organisations, like us, to lead and support them, says Khan. In corporates, too, many are probably in that disillusionment phase, realising that they have to figure out how to operationalise it.BT this year brought forward its annually reviewed net-zero target for the business to 2031, and for the customer and supply chain to 2041 from 2050. How?First, we looked at how we accelerate our plan on EV [electric vehicle] transition, as one of the largest fleet operators in the UK. Second, we looked closely at what we could reduce across our supply chain.About 70% of BT emissions are Scope 3, so supply chain efficiencies are crucial. Tier 1 contracts are coming in for specific attention, he adds, and must have a science-based net-zero target against which they disclose performance.If you dont move the dial in that [Scope 3] space, getting to target is very difficult, says Khan. BT is doing more advocacy including alongside competitors as well as looking at the make-up of its renewables certificates and power purchase agreements. Multiple innovations and efficiencies are crucial as datacentre power demand rises, Khan points out.Jon Healy, chief operating officer (COO) at datacentre solutions provider Keysource, reiterates that customers are shifting their net-zero strategies, including increasingly pushing suppliers to do more and reveal more rather than pulling back. Previously, some net-zero plans werent viable.In our world, theyre not going to get more customers if theyre not addressing their own emissions. Of course, whats difficult is to get there despite the pressures, including speed to market, constrained supply chains and demand for compute, Healy maintains.This has an impact right back to the drawing board, to strategic decision-making about where an organisation goes and which projects are fundamental.Consequent designs have to underlie and underpin sustainability and carbon intensity, as well as support datacentre sector growth. Entire ecosystems are being evaluated. Upcoming infrastructure refreshes look likely to reap the benefits of currently evolving data, frameworks and metrics.Read more about achieving net zero in ITAWS, Microsoft and Google urge datacentre kit suppliers to improve Scope 3 data collection, putting their names to an open letter, calling on third parties to do a better job with helping calculate Scope 3 emissions of cloud platforms.Enterprises advised to reconsider datacentre hosting locations on sustainability grounds as joint research by Scottish datacentre firm DataVita and IT sustainability consultancy Posetiv suggests enterprises might be better off from an environmental perspective by shaking up their datacentre hosting arrangement.Companies must understand where their carbon emissions sit and whats causing impacts or generating those emissions, and really pinpoint the detail to realise savings, says Healy.Mary Jacques, director of global environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and regulatory compliance at Lenovo, agrees. It is continuing to focus on full carbon accounting, increasingly homing in on Scope 3 supplier emissions, partly in response to customer requirements across its portfolio. Its not about taking your foot off the pedal temporarily in response to unfavourable economics, she says.With AI particularly, theres demand to understand full impacts and help customers build up AI investments and infrastructure in the right way, Jacques adds.These are long-term commitments by their nature, she points out. Ours, including the net-zero targets, remain the same.Progress towards lower emissions continues under the surface of reports, commentators suggest. For example, bidirectional information flows between Lenovo, customers and suppliers are still developing, but ultimately, organisations will better quantify and reveal progress on emissions. Michael OHara, founder of not-for-profit support group Techies Go Green, is aware of economic pressures affecting organisational emissions reduction plans. That said, he believes whats going on is more a readjustment of expectations and deflation of greenwash, even overhyped green growth. Its like in the 1990s the internet was going to change how we did business, and there was huge investment, and then the dot com crash. But slowly, surely, the enlightenment period happened, maybe 10 years later, says OHara. The sustainability hype kicked in after the 2016 Paris Agreement and Biden took office, and when BlackRock said theyd prioritise sustainability investments in 2020.If hes right, going green looks about halfway along. OHara says we can still see longer-term sustainability and profitability. Short-term thinking can be the enemy in business, as much as in politics with leaders only looking to their next election. Among our members, theres still positive sentiment, but there is a slowness in moving forward and putting in the investment. [In fact] a lot of [previous] net-zero goals have been too high Michael OHara, Techies Go GreenAmong our members, theres still positive sentiment, but there is a slowness in moving forward and putting in the investment. To be honest, a lot of [previous] net-zero goals have been too high, OHara says.Over time, though, he expects emissions reduction to embed into company cultures, not least as data and transparency improve, with teams increasingly buying into the requirements. Until now, this has proven difficult in many companies, with sustainability sometimes tasked to the marketing person or receptionist, rather than someone with physical levers to pull. A lot of education and information communication still remains to be done as well.OHara points out that people are still joining Techies Go Green it now has 650-plus members and targets 1,000. That suggests many still take emissions reduction seriously.Ben Brial, founder of green platform engineering company Cycloid, agrees theres progress, especially on carbon accounting. Yet short-cut generative AI (GenAI) projects, such as Chinas DeepSeek, should remind industry that alternative paths to innovation can exist beyond brute-force financial scaleup. Prior to AI, many had this mindset about we grow at any cost. The goal was to go faster, regardless of resource use, says Brial. But organisations can develop new, more economical, more sustainable methods and strategies, including in emissions reduction. Cheaper is not new, but the idea of pushing to use less resources is kind of a new game-changer, says Brial. We can think our way to different solutions and ways of achieving our priorities, goals and objectives.