CIO — Greenpeace International released the fourth version of its "Cool IT Leaderboard" on Tuesday, and Cisco, Ericsson (ERIC) and Fujitsu ranked atop the list of 17 global high-tech companies.

"The Cool IT leaderboard evaluates global IT companies on their leadership in the fight to stop climate change," notes the announcement. "The IT sector possesses the innovative spirit, technological know-how and political influence to bring about a rapid clean energy revolution."

Cisco maintained the top spot in Greenpeace's rankings, which lauded the high-tech company's "commitment to building climate solutions, such as remote collaboration, connected workplace, connected buildings and telecommute offerings, and demonstration of sound methodology in calculating their potential to cut carbon emissions across other sectors of the economy."

IT companies are evaluated by Greenpeace in three areas: efforts to offer economywide technological climate solutions that contribute to global greenhouse gas reductions; initiatives to reduce their own global warming emissions; active engagement in political advocacy and support for science-based climate and energy policies.

New to the latest version are Oracle (ORCL) and Wipro. Despite the progress being made, though, Greenpeace is looking for even more climate-change leadership from the high-tech sector.

"The gap between leaders and laggards has widened in this round," states the report, "as many companies are still failing to incorporate the carbon-reducing potential of IT products and services into core business decisions and development, or into their lobbying efforts."

[ For a not-so politically correct take on the green movement, see Sustainability: Important, But Boring As Hell ]

For instance, companies such as Microsoft (MSFT), Intel (INTC) and IBM (IBM), and many of the Japanese brands, "received a penalty for failing to make a public break from the negative positions of business associations that represent them," states the Greenpeace report.

Greenpeace regularly updates its "Cool IT Leaderboard" and, according to the organization, its goal is to track the progress of the largest IT brands toward achieving economywide greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 15 percent by 2020.

Thomas Wailgum covers Enterprise Software, Data Management and Personal Productivity Apps for CIO.com. Follow him on Twitter @twailgum. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline. E-mail Thomas at twailgum@cio.com.