Behind the numbers in 2014: Carbon (CO2/£m)

Target:
Deliver a 5% reduction in gross (Scope 1 and 2) CO2/£m revenue in 2014 compared to 2013.

How we did:
Our gross carbon emissions per £million in revenue increased 5.3%.

The detail:
The largest proportion of our carbon footprint comes from the energy we use in our network and we know that this increase in carbon emissions was due to the growth of our business operations and the increased demand placed on our network between 2007 and 2014 – in fact, data usage on our network grew 202% between 2012 and 2014*. 

We now have access to information showing carbon emissions per Tera Byte (TB) of data and we plan to report using this factor in the future, in order to demonstrate how we’re driving efficiency while data and technology demands increase. We believe this will be a more helpful metric going forward because our carbon emissions are more strongly linked to increased data on our network, rather than being linked to our revenue.

Find out more about our new operations goal here.

*In order to provide a meaningful target to measure our energy usage against our business operations, we measure our GHG emissions per terabyte (TB) of data traffic generated as we run our network and customers use our services. This calculation reflects internet protocol (IP) based data traffic from fixed broadband services, such as web browsing, IP streaming voice and video services, from all our market operations that we can reliably measure. This represents close to 50% of the revenue we generate from our total service offerings. For more information, click here.