Orange takes data-oriented approach to achieving Scope 3 targets

Reducing Scope 3 emissions “is the big, big topic for most companies today,” according to Jérôme Goulard, Chief Sustainability Officer at Orange Business, with enterprises making it a priority when requesting information about Orange Business services.

Scope 3 refers to indirect emissions from assets that telcos do not own or control directly. Typically, they account for 90% or more of a telco’s total CO2 emissions. Orange Business is no exception.

“We now have the first estimate of our Scope 3 global footprint, and it’s more than 90% of the total CO2 emissions of Orange Business,” Goulard says.

The other bad news is that global Scope 3 emissions are currently moving in the wrong direction. “Right now, today, we still see an increase,” Goulard remarks.

Orange Group, however, is working hard to reverse the trend, with the aim of reducing Scope 3 emissions by 14% in 2025 compared with 2018.

Given the sprawling complexity of scope 3 emissions, it is having to take a multi-pronged approach. According to Orange’s current estimates, most of its Scope 3 emissions are produced by suppliers in the manufacturing process, while customers are responsible for about 5% or 6% of the total. It therefore has a big focus on collecting data about suppliers and the actions they are taking to reduce their own carbon footprint.

Orange then combines this data with its marketing analytics tool and distributes it to the company’s various business units to provide an overview of the carbon footprint of products and services.

It also uses data to impose greater demands on its suppliers and bakes these into RFPs, explains Goulard.

At the same time, the group works closely with partners to design and implement more sustainable solutions for B2B customers.

Goulard also emphasizes the importance of developing a circular economy, “to be able to collect, reuse, refurbish, recycle equipment … with our suppliers, we have defined specific contract clauses about circular economy … in fact, we are developing new sourcing practices related to the circular economy.”

A partial picture

However, Goulard warns that it is still very early days when it comes to measuring the CO2 emissions of products and services, and the landscape is constantly shifting.

For example, he notes that the level of confidence in data provided even by the main digital players such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce and Cisco is only up to 80% in some cases, “so we have to deal with that. That’s the reality.”

Orange is therefore working on the methodologies and models that are needed to calculate, measure and analyze carbon footprints, including the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

“We collect all this data and … see how we can combine [it] to have an estimate of the global CO2 footprint of our digital solutions,” he said.

As well as its main suppliers, Orange is working with start-ups that are developing tools to measure the global CO2 footprint of companies. For example, Orange Ventures invested in Traace, a start-up designing carbon management models that can be applied to the analysis of Scope 3 and suppliers.

But any audit of Scope 3 emissions requires a broad collaboration with the wider ecosystem.

“No one has the answer alone,” he said. “We are working with a coalition of partners and sometimes competitors … for example, with other telcos we have created the Joint Audit Cooperation [JAC], where we define the key criteria we want to get from our main suppliers. And then all together we audit the activities or practices of our key suppliers in these domains.”

Like other companies, Orange is preparing for the introduction of the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) from 2024. “So we have to get ready this year with hundreds of KPIs, information that we will have to communicate on,” he explains. This huge and complex task will in future be split in future between the company’s finance and CSR departments.

Beyond Scope 3

Reducing Scope 3 is of course one element in an ongoing mission to create a sustainable telco. Goulard also highlights how Orange has been using AI and data for some time to improve the environmental performance of its network, including within the long-running Green ITN program that focuses on reducing network emissions. By the end of June 2023, the group said it had already reached its target of reducing Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 30% compared with 2015, ahead of the initial 2025 deadline.

For example, Orange Business has been working with Orange Poland to collect and analyze data in order to optimize the implementation of mobile network antennas, and was able to reduce electricity consumption by 15%.

In addition, Orange Business is deploying a solution called Smart Telco Energy to monitor the energy performance of ten office and technical sites around the world with the highest levels of CO2 emissions. By analyzing data that shows abnormal levels of energy consumption, Orange has been able to reduce energy usage by 10%.

Goulard also noted that a move to the cloud is generally better for application management because shared data centers promotes optimized energy use.

Essentially, we’re all in this together, he concludes, noting that it will take the right approaches to data, analysis and monitoring to reach environmental targets. “It’s about organizing the whole ecosystem.