TWO climate-change websites, which cost at least €670,000 to create and maintain, have effectively been jettisoned by the government on cost grounds.

Contracts for the two high-profile campaign sites change.ie and the Power of One have been terminated and amalgamated into other government websites.

The Department of the Environment confirmed that the contract for the Change campaign was cancelled at the end of October this year.

The two websites were key parts of a wider campaign on climate change, which has cost more than €10m over the past two years.

Last year, maintenance of the change.ie website cost €450,000, according to figures from the Department of the Environment.

Three websites involved in the Power of One campaign involved a cost of €220,000 but the contract for its campaign was not renewed in December 2008.

The Department of the Environment said: "The contract for the Change campaign was terminated on 31 October 2009. Since then, while the brand has been maintained, the content of the change.ie site has been transferred to the climate-change section of www.enfo.ie.

"The calculators for individuals and organisations [are] being managed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

"This will ensure the climate-change content will continue to be developed and savings will ensue in respect of hosting and maintenance."

The department said that responsibility for Power of One and energy-efficient promotions had now passed on to Sustainable Energy Ireland (SEI).

It said: "As part of these arrangements, the standalone Power of One website was terminated and relevant campaign materials were migrated to the existing SEI website content management and hosting infrastructure, where they were combined with SEI's existing consumer advice materials."

The total cost of the national climate-change campaign in 2008 was €7.13m with a budget for this year of just €3.5m.

Of last year's expenditure, €2.57m went on fees, €2.12m to media, primarily advertising, and €587,000 on website management.

The government insisted that the two campaigns were effective and that surveys had shown that they had changed the way people think.

The European Commission also praised the schemes and said they were a good example of how mass awareness campaigns should work.

Labour's Liz McManus said: "There was a huge amount of money involved in these two campaigns and there is little evidence of any result.

"We have to have real cooperation amongst departments if we are going to meet the challenge in climate change and this is a really classic example of how the system is not working.

"These little projects do nothing to tackle the bigger issue. Climate change is the big challenge of our generation and the scale of the task requires a much more fundamental approach than this.

"Here we have two websites doing the exact same thing: nobody knows if they are having any impact and there was absolutely no indication if any of it was worth it."