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.

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.