This roundtable, entitled "Opportunities and challenges of greening ICT", organised as part of the activities of the Greening Europe Forum,  will take place on Thursday, 31 March 2011 at the Bibliothèque Solvay in Brussels.

The discussion will be sub-divided in two sessions. The first part of the debate will look at the competitive advantages and opportunties cloud computing can provide for government business and citizens in several areas of the European economy such as health, transport or environmental protection.  

The second part will concentrate on the green challenges of cloud computing. On the one hand, it can help to solve sustainability challenges (e.g. climate monitoring, traffic control, tele-working and remote conferencing). On the other hand, the big data centres behind cloud computing will need huge amounts of energy and can have a large environmental impact in terms of resource use. Can cloud computing be greened?