However, the process of embedding sustainability into company strategy has not come without challenges and difficulties.
As a result of this preparation, the environmental team has been able to quickly support and capitalise on new opportunities as they have arisen, ensuring they can keep the momentum going whenever it builds. By the time colleagues from other departments approach the environmental team with their requirements for sustainability-related projects (for example the finance team’s interest in launching a Green Bond), the team is already armed with a range of data, materials and resources needed to put together a business case for the activity. This determined and visionary approach means that the environmental team works intuitively and pre-empts other departments’ needs. When they recruit new employees, their priority is to find people with the ability to come up with innovative ideas for meeting sustainability targets, resilience, and perseverance. Through our many conversations with Telefónica’s environmental team, perseverance stood out as the most important characteristic within the team. The team has used a mixture of bottom-up and top-down approaches, with management support at crucial moments, which will be explored later in the report. Key activities and inflection points in Telefónica’sĮmbedding sustainability into Telefónica has been a grassroots effort on the part of the small but hardworking Global Sustainability Department (hereafter known as the environmental team in this report) to find the proof points necessary to convince Telefónica’s senior management to build sustainability into the corporate strategy. Figure 2 outlines Telefónica’s sustainability journey and key inflection points through the years. It has three main climate targets: energy efficiency and reducing energy consumption utilising renewable energy and reducing its carbon footprint to achieve net-zero emissions in 2040, including its value chain. Over the last ten years Telefónica has implemented more than 1,400 energy efficiency projects and has carried an annual Energy and Climate Change Workshop with more than 30 vendors for 12 consecutive years, to exchange challenges and solutions to reduce their energy consumption and carbon emissions. The first move in this direction came with the creation of the Climate Change Office in 2007, which included senior representatives from Operations, Procurement and Social Responsibility. Since the creation of Telefónica’s first sustainability team in 2001, the operator has gradually built up its sustainability activities into a company-wide approach with cross team participation over the last twenty years. Enter your details below to request an extract of the report We believe this will help other telcos intent on following a similar trajectory to understand how they can embed sustainability into their corporate strategies and day-to-day activities. With the support of Telefónica’s sustainability team, through candid interviews with the team and their colleagues across the business, we have created this case study on their experiences in embedding sustainability across the business. This is a highly impressive achievement for such a large operator. Through our interactions with Telefónica’s sustainability team, we have also found the team to be seriously committed, organised and successful in achieving buy-in to their vision from both the executive leadership team and several business units and opcos.
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