Telecoms sustainability indicators workshop

This stakeholder workshop on sustainability indicators was a milestone in the study currently done by DG CNECT and DG JRC to identify the most suitable indicators for telecommunication networks.

The workshop aimed at collecting input and feedback from the stakeholders in the telecommunication sector on a number of questions including:

• Which should be considered the most relevant sustainability indicators for reporting?
• What are the main challenges for stakeholders for the implementation of these indicators?
• How could the work by auditors be supported?

The workshop also had the objective of providing a perspective on the various parallel studies conducted by stakeholders or stakeholder associations (e.g., BEREC, GSMA), which would be useful for the Commission to move towards a Code of Conduct for the telecommunications sector by 2025.

The study builds on the results of an EU survey conducted by DG JRC from 26 May to 23 June 2023 where similar feedback was collected. The results of the survey were presented in this workshop.

The workshop had the goal to:

• Identify the key sustainability indicators for telecommunication networks and/or consolidate the recommendations from the survey and the report on priority indicators.

• Collect input and feedback from the main stakeholders, who were present at the workshop on how to go forward on a Code of Conduct for telecommunications networks in the 2025 timeframe, which can be complementary to the already published Codes of Conduct (mostly coordinated by the JRC) for data centres and broadband equipment.

• Identify key standardisation or metric gaps, which can hamper the work by auditors or telecom operators to report on sustainability indicators in the future.

• Identify ongoing activities in this area and parallel regulatory actions to create synergies and avoid overlaps.

• There was a general agreement on the indicators with the highest priority identified in the survey (‘must have’ indicators) with the exception of the indicator related to the raw materials, which was also suggested as important by some stakeholders during the workshop. On the other side, telecom operators and vendors stressed the importance of focusing on few indicators because the data collection, analysis and reporting for even few indicators can be a significant effort for telecom operators, in particular for small and medium sized ones.

• Life cycle assessment (LCA) was mentioned as an important methodology for evaluating the sustainability impact in the different phases of the network and the equipment. The JRC will build on its existing work in this area. The JRC report on “Best Environmental Management Practice in the Telecommunications and ICT Services sector”could also be used for this purpose.

• For auditing purposes, it was considered important to set a harmonised conceptual framework, which can facilitate the analysis by auditors. In addition, it was noted that it is quite difficult to compare networks from different Member States and it would be more effective to evaluate the sustainability indicators for the same networks over time as the network evolves.

• There were some aspects related to the renewable energy indicator, which should be analysed more in detail because there is the risk to create imbalances among stakeholders (e.g., regarding access to renewable energies).

• Smaller operators may have difficulties to gather data on some ‘must have’ indicators that large operators are able to gather (e.g., scope 3 emissions and recyclable products, where there are still standardisation gaps). It would be important to avoid a market imbalance for the data collection and analysis of sustainability indicators, which may penalise smaller companies in comparison to larger ones.

• Role of legacy infrastructure and how it is accounted for (e.g., trade-offs between higher energy use vs. longer lifetime, which would be better for the environment).

• There were a number of initiatives mentioned that could support the way forward, such as the Science-based targets initiative (SBI) and the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).

• In the design and drafting of the Code of Conduct (CoC), it would be useful to describe the responsibility of all the stakeholders involved in the processes for sustainability data collection, analysis and reporting.

• Some stakeholders underlined the need to work on quantifying the enabling effect of telecoms on other sectors (not in scope of this study but done by the European Green Digital Coalition).

• Feedback from past activities on existing CoCs. For example, the wording and terms of the Data Centre CoC had to be completely changed by auditors to make it auditable, in particular for the pass/fail criteria.

The next steps by DG CNECT/DG JRC for the study were identified as follows:

• DG CNECT/JRC will draft a report of this workshop based on the collected notes and recordings, to be included in the study.

• DG CNECT/JRC will finalise the study so that it can be published in beginning of 2024.

• The material of the workshop (presentations, recordings) will be made public.