By Gerard Wynn and David Fogarty

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – President Barack Obama has expressed confidence a climate deal can be clinched as dozens of world leaders gather on Wednesday to try to break a deadlock at U.N. climate talks.

“The president believes that we can get an operational agreement that makes sense in Copenhagen,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told a briefing in Washington on Tuesday, three days before a deadline on a new U.N. deal to combat climate change.

Leaders including Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown were set to give speeches at the December 7-18 climate meeting, until now dominated by environment ministers.

The world leaders have until a main summit on Friday to agree a deal under a deadline set at a meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007. Negotiations since Bali have been marred by mistrust between rich and poor nations.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in an International Herald Tribune opinion piece on Tuesday that success in Copenhagen demanded that all major economies take decisive action and agree to a system that is transparent and trusted.

“The president believes that to get an agreement that is truly operational, that we have to have that — that transparency. That’s one of the things that he’ll work on as we go forward,” Gibbs said.

As the deadline approaches for a pact that would favor a shift to low-carbon businesses, some politicians are warning of the risks of failure in the 193-nation negotiations, even as they urge compromises to allow a breakthrough.

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Cisco’s strategy is based on catching market transitions – the market transitions that affect our customers. With the proliferation of video and collaborative Web 2.0 technologies, the network continues to evolve from the plumbing of the internet – providing connectivity – to the platform that will change the way we work, live , play and learn.  Cisco is truly dedicated to our customers and to creating long-lasting customer partnerships and working with customers to identify needs and provide solutions that support success. 

Cisco and its employees are committed to environmental sustainability. Corporate and social responsibility is a key component of our culture. Cisco works to combine the power of innovation with collaboration to create a sustainable model for addressing global environmental challenges. Innovation is at the heart of what Cisco does, and collaboration – both internally and externally – helps fuel new ideas across Cisco along with customers and partners to combat environmental challenges.

Cisco demonstrates its high level of environmental responsibility through our business operations, products and customer solutions. Cisco’s sustainability programs are aimed at:

• Reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent by 2012
• Utilizing our own-network based collaboration products to cut down on business travel
• Obtaining power generated by renewable resources
• Managing operational waste – our waste diversion rate exceeded 80 per cent in 2008 in our corporate head office
• Designing power efficient products, embedding green requirements into product design and establishing targets for manufacturing partners with regard to generation, treatment and disposal of waste
• Helping our customers make environmentally conscious decisions

Cisco conforms to many international standards, including ISO 14001 certification, and makes protecting the environment a priority. Cisco was ranked 8^th on the U.S. EPA list of Green Power Purchasers and scored 96 out of 100 on the Carbon Disclosure leadership index.

In a paper published in Science, they warned that this has serious implications for ecosystems in the Arctic.

“Organisms that are likely to be affected are from the family of pteropods, also mussels and clams on the sea floor,” said Fiona McLaughlin, research scientist at Canada’s Institute of Ocean Sciences’s department of fisheries and oceans.

Read the full article from Reuters here: http://ca.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idCATRE5AI4QY20091119

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“Organizations will need to have a well rounded plan in place that encompasses threats to business productivity including sudden catastrophic natural disasters, and terrorist attacks as well as the slow and subtle threat of a large scale disease outbreak which we are facing this flu season,” said Darin Stahl, lead analyst for Info-Tech Research Group.   

The report “IT Planning Guide for Infectious Disease Outbreaks,” outlines the four specific areas of information technologies and IT governance that are critical to enable successful business continuity in the event that an H1N1 outbreak impacts an organization.  

1. Collaboration tools and technologies
2. Enterprise and desktop applications
3. Service desk tools and desktop support
4. Virtual private networks (VPN) and virtual desktops

Recommendations in collaboration highlight web conferencing tools as the most effective tool allowing employees to collaborate in real time on business documents, spreadsheets and enterprise applications while quarantined in their homes.  Organizations without a web conferencing technology standard should quickly choose and implement an on-demand Web conferencing solution or recommend a free solution for 1-on-1 meetings in the event of an actual emergency.

Employees will also need home access to the enterprise applications they use on a daily basis at work.  Organizations which provide most or all of their employees with company laptops can sit pretty knowing that there is not much work to do to ensure applications are accessible, but those with large departments of employees working from stationary workstations will need to consider a virtual desktop implementation.

Of course, IT staff will also need access to helpdesk and systems management tools to support remote workers.  In the event that an organization does feel impact from an outbreak, an “outbreak service level agreement” is imperative as IT is sure to be inundated with requests and expectations need to be set to ahead of time.

Common practice in business continuity plans is to rely on consumer broadband networks to provide connectivity through a VPN connected to corporate applications. 

“IT departments should be prepared if public/consumer broadband networks become clogged under the strain of masses of employees working from home,” Stahl warns.  “There is no easy solution to this dilemma, but organizations need to be prepared to put money towards providing employees in business critical roles with costly yet committed connectivity.”

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