Helping society to decarbonise
Digitalisation and high-speed connectivity will be enablers of the global green recovery.
The EU has recognised that twin digital and green transformations are required at the centre of recovery plans for all regions, sectors and applications across the EU as they seek to drive efficiency and reduce their environmental footprint. As a result, the EU has pledged to allocate 20% of the Recovery and Resilience Facility fund to the digital transition and 37% to drive green investments.
For Vodafone, our most important contribution to tackling climate change is by enabling our customers (including businesses and governments) to reduce their environmental footprint using our digital technologies and services.
Our goal
Vodafone is committed to helping our business customers reduce their carbon emissions by a cumulative total of 350 million tonnes globally between 2020 and 2030.
Digitalisation will be a key enabler of the transition to a low-carbon society
Our global, cumulative enablement target of 350 million tonnes of CO2e over the ten year period from 2020 - 2030 will be largely delivered via Vodafone’s IoT services, including logistics and fleet management, smart metering and manufacturing activities.
We work with the Carbon Trust to calculate the total GHG emissions avoided as a consequence of our IoT technologies and services. Since setting our target, we estimate that our green digital solutions have helped avoid our customers avoid emissions of over 47 million tonnes CO2e. Over the last year, we have seen these estimated avoided emissions increase as deployed more green digital solutions and expanded our understanding of their enablement potential. In 2023, we estimate almost 25 million tonnes CO2e emissions were avoided, which is 26 times the emissions generated from our own operations (Scope 1 & 2).
In March 2021, we became a founding member of the European Green Digital Coalition. The coalition brings together ICT sector companies to work together with EU policymakers and experts to drive investment in—and implementation of—digital solutions in action against climate change.
Over the last year, we implemented a Carbon Enablement Toolkit to help our product teams consider the enablement potential of the products we develop. We continue to advocate for the acceleration of the green digital transition by showcasing green digital solutions at key events, which last year included COP27, the World Mobile Congress and GreenTech festival.
Connectivity and IoT are critical enablers to delivering green impact across value chains. For example:
Smart agriculture
- Lower impact on natural resources
- Less emissions from fertilisers
- Biodiversity restoration
- Regenerative agriculture
- Better animal welfare
- Smaller land use
Smart energy meters
- Empowerment of people to change behaviours
- Reduced energy consumption
- Transparency
- Next generation
Smart cities
- More energy-efficient delivery of services
- Better traffic flows, fewer congestions
- Less waste
- Improved air quality (lower pollution)
Smart logistics
- Lower fuel consumption
- Few emissions
- Continuous incremental efficiency gains
- Less waste (including food)
- Supply chain traceability
Smart manufacturing
- Greater resource efficiency
- Circular economy potential
- Lower energy consumption
- Less pollution and waste
- Improved health and safety
- Greater precision, fewer faults
Our strategy in action
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Contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals
We aim to build a inclusive and sustainable digital society. Through our connectivity and digital innovations (SDG 9) and through our partnerships (SDG 17) we can accelerate and scale delivery across multiple SDGs.
