You can send an eCard selecting a design from The Prince's Rainforest Project Christmas Card Competition for Schools.

The overall winner is:

Ben Keene, The Greville Primary School. Ben's design will not only be made into an eCard for supporters to send online, it will also be the official card of The Prince's Rainforests Project. Ben's school will receive 200 printed cards of his design. Congratulations Ben.

The definition of "carbon-free" is that it is produced without any emissions, what is called "fully decarbonised". On the other hand, something that is "carbon neutral" does have emissions, a carbon footprint, but it is offset by energy saving, reforestation or other programmes, so the net effect of this is zero.

If we ask ourselves the question, "do I prefer to be carbon-free or carbon neutral?" obviously the best choice for the environment is to be carbon-free. It is best not to produce a carbon footprint to start with, to be fully decarbonised. It is great in theory, trickier in practice. During the pre-industrial era societies were almost entirely decarbonised, so our existence as human beings is not impossible in a decarbonised environment. This is the general principle of pursuing CO₂ —and other greehouse gases— emission cuts. The goal is to get as close to full decarbonisation as we can.

During this week's UN Climate Change talks in Poland the crux of the matter is emission cuts. We can go a long way closer to decarbonisation than we are today, and the core of the argument is to get rich countries to dramatically cut their emissions and developing countries to follow suit without getting into a cycle of pollution and excessive emissions that rich countries engaged in for decades to get to the level of industrial development they enjoy today. Developing countries feel a lot is being asked from them, and rich countries are not even setting the right example.

So the first step is cut emissions, but while we have a footprint, the second step (or rather, simultaneous step) must be to offset it. At any given time we should aspire to be carbon neutral even if we are not carbon-free, which is obviously infinitely better for the environment.

At the moment we are running a campaign to raise awareness about the carbon footprint of the internet, and the emissions that we cause by producing and maintaining websites. We offer our customers a personalised service to make your websites carbon neutral and also we want to encourage everyone to produce websites as carbon-free as possible to start with.

Google, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and other companies have been successful in adopting technologies to make their servers carbon-free. Google's "sea-faring solution" is an imaginative concept that uses tidal energy and waves to produce electricity to cool and power data centres. This kind of concept will be more widely used in the future, given that data centres contribute to nearly one fourth of the internet's carbon footprint - obviously it will be key to look at ways to change how we run them in order to cut emissions.

For smaller companies not quite in the league of the internet giants, the vast majority of us who rely on data centres powered by conventional energy sources, the way forward to achieve emission cuts is to demand from service providers to switch to greener and renewable sources of energy, and to offset the remainder of the carbon footprint in order to remain carbon neutral.