Kern, Eva, Dick, Markus, Johann, Timo, Naumann, Stefan, Golinska, Paulina, Fertsch, Marek, and Marx-Gomez, Jorge
Information technologies have evolved to an enabling science for natural resource management and conservation, environmental engineering, scientific simulation and integrated assessment studies. Computing plays a significant role in every day practices of environmental engineers, natural scientists, economists, and social scientists. The complexity of natural phenomena require interdisciplinary approaches, where computing science offers the infrastructure for environmental data collection and management, scientific simulations, decision support, documentation and reporting. Ecology, environmental engineering and natural resource management comprise an excellent real-world testbed for IT system demonstration, while bring up new challenges for computer science. Complexity, uncertainty and scaling issues of natural systems set up a demanding application domain for sensor networks and earth observation systems; modelling, simulation and scientific workflows; data management and reporting; decision support and intelligent systems; distributed computing environments; geographical information systems; heterogeneous systems integration; software engineering; accounting systems; and control systems.This books offers a collection of papers presented at the 4th International Symposium on Environmental Engineering, held in May 2009, in Thessaloniki, Greece. Recent success stories in ecoinformatics, promising ideas and new challenges are discussed among computer scientists, environmental engineers, economists and social scientists, demonstrating new paradigms for problem solving and decision making. Caused by the movement to a sustainable development, Green IT is still a big trend and more than just a buzz phrase. Especially data centers are working on their own energy efficiency. Additionally, Green IT needs to involve end users as the ones who play a decisive role in the utilization phase of ICT (ICT: information and communication technology) devices as well as software products according to the idea of Life Cycle Thinking. In our chapter, we describe some typical end user software usage scenarios and take measurements to ascertain the energy consumption induced by these. We compare the energy consumption of word processors as well as the energy consumption induced by web browsers. In regard to sustainable development, the user has to be involved in the movements of Green IT.