This year’s SustainIT conference was held in Palermo, Italy, from Oktober 30 to Oktober 31, 2013. Paricipants from all over the world discussed the state of the art and future directions of sustainable IT systems and technologies. Jens Heider and Daniel Tasche participated for the University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz and the Enterprise Application Development Group. This year’s subject area was about the increasing social awareness and in particular the need to contain energy consumption within sustainable rates. The keynote speech Smart city & smart communities: the roadmap towards sustainable cities demonstrated central concepts and ideas of the updoming presentations and discussions at the conference. This includes new approaches and concepts for Smart Energy, Smart Living, Smart Governance, Smart Economy, Smart Mobility and Smart Environment.

We presented a paper about A Greenhouse Gas Accounting Tool for Regional and Municipal Climate Change Management. Regional greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories support the development and monitoring of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies as well as policies for municipalities and cities. However, information and scientific expertise on climate change impacts are complex and a consensual and consistent methodology on formation of regional GHG inventories is still missing. Available methodologies and calculation tools mostly fail to balance scientific adequacy and usability from a pragmatic perspective. Within the project Regional Carbon Footprint (RCF), software that allows data management (i.e. for bottom up data) in order to calculate regional greenhouse gas inventories and to report about regional carbon footprints has been developed. Efforts needed for data collection turned out to be the main bottleneck for application from a practitioner's point of view. The presented RCF approach overcomes these shortcomings by closing this gap with the use of top down data taken from statistics.