Good morning. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to Telstra Sustainability Roundtable for 2021. I'm Brent Lioutas from Telstra Investor Relations. Before we begin, on behalf of Telstra, I'd like to acknowledge the rich and diverse stories, cultures, and traditions of all First Nations people across Country. I'm joining today from what was once known as Naarm and now known as Melbourne, and I acknowledge the ancestors, elders, and families of the Kulin Nation. We have an exciting agenda this morning. First, you'll hear an introduction from Andrew Penn, our CEO. Lyndall Stoyles and Jules Scarlett will then take you through our approach to responsible business. We'll then open to the first of our two Q&A sessions. Our first Q&A session will include Andrew Penn. You can ask questions at any time this morning by typing your question into the box to the left of this media player.
Please include your name and company. I will read out your questions during the Q&A sessions. After our first Q&A, we will deep dive into three key sustainability topics. Christie Ditchburn will take you through modern slavery and human rights, followed by Tom Penny on environmental leadership and Jackie Coates on Telstra Foundation. We'll then close with a second Q&A. All speakers, with the exception of Andy, will be available for this second Q&A. So that's the running order for today. With that, I'll hand over to Andy. Andy.
Well, thank you very much, Brent. Welcome, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today. The purpose of today's presentations is to take you on a comprehensive deep dive into key aspects of Telstra's focus on sustainability. We want to explain how our sustainability activities are driven by our purpose and our values. We want to demonstrate why we've embedded these ideas and commitments into our T25 strategy. And we want to bring to life the many ambitious goals that we have set ourselves to be a leading, responsible, and sustainable business. As part of this today, I am very proud to announce that Telstra will be broadening its existing greenhouse gas emission reduction targets to include a 50% reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030.
Scope 3 emissions are the indirect emissions from the activities that we rely on to operate our business and to provide our products and services. They include emissions made by our suppliers when they manufacture equipment that is installed in our network, and even the energy used by the modems and other devices that we provide to our customers. Telstra's Scope 3 emissions are three times greater than our direct Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Committing to reducing them by 50% by 2030 from FY19 is a significant step. It means that for the first time, we have the ability to identify, evaluate, and most importantly, go after the greatest greenhouse gas emission reduction opportunities across our entire value chain. It's a comprehensive strategy designed to make a real difference.
Now, we'll share more on our Scope 3 emissions profile and our plan to reduce them a bit later. But for now, I wanted to set the scene for today's discussion by recapping on our T25 strategy and how our responsible business sits within it. Our T25 strategy is built around our purpose and our values. They're more than just words for us. They are why we do what we do. They guide what we stand for, and we align everything with them. We believe it's people who give purpose to our technology. So we're committed to staying close to our customers and providing them with the best experience and delivering the best technology on the best network because our purpose is to build a connected future so everyone can thrive. It's a purpose underpinned by our values, which guide how we approach the decisions that we make.
They are the underlying principles for how we will deliver T25. We will make it simple. We care. We're better together, and we are the change makers. T25 is built around four key strategic pillars. The first is to provide an exceptional customer experience that you can count on. Nothing is more important than continuing to improve customer experience, and this sits at the very heart of T25 and, importantly, leverages the significant capabilities that we have built through our T25 strategy. The second pillar is to provide leading network and technology solutions that deliver your future. Telstra has always been at the forefront of telecommunications technology, not just in Australia, but globally. Never has this been more important than today in a world of rapid digital adoption, and we continue to maintain our leadership, particularly in 5G.
The third pillar is to create sustained growth and value for our shareholders. As we move forward from the period of the transition to the NBN and out from under that economic headwind, the significant interventions that we have made in turning our business around and taking out cost are now starting to flow through to the bottom line. The fourth and final pillar is to be the place you want to work because competing for the best talent in the future is going to rely on more than just the basics. There are essentially three ways that we will bring this to life at Telstra through T25: by excelling at new ways of working, by accelerating our digital leadership, and by doing business responsibly. So firstly, excelling at new ways of working.
Through T22, we have moved almost 20,000 people to now be working in Agile, and we now have the largest at-scale workforce in the Country working in Agile. Through T25, we will further evolve our Agile approach, and we will deliver it at scale. We will also continue to enhance our approach to talent acquisition, mobility, and career management as we embrace flexibility that has been enabled by location-agnostic recruiting policies and the new hybrid ways of working that give our people choice when it comes to where they work, when they work, and how they work. The second aspect of the place you want to work is digital leadership. Our strategy for leading network and technology solutions that deliver your future and that I have just mentioned, this is about the underlying technology.
What I'm talking about here with digital leadership is the digital mindset that we need to bring to that technology. Our approach here includes leading with a digital-first and data-driven mindset, embedding digital ways of working and building out our digital skills, focusing on delivering an outstanding developer experience and digital partnerships, and finally enhancing our digital infrastructure, including through the use of APIs to increase the speed to market and improve efficiency and products for our customers. The third and final aspect of the place you want to work is the stance that we take on doing business responsibly. There is no doubt that community expectations of what this means have changed, and big business, including Telstra, still have some way to go to build and maintain trust with the communities in which we operate and those that we serve.
Also, key talent today wants to work for companies that have a strong focus on sustainability, and this is only going to increase over the period of our T25 strategy. While there are many aspects of this, for us, there are three in particular that are really important. First and foremost, it's about having trusted operations.
This goes to every aspect of our business, from making sure we have sales practices that are appropriate to ensuring our supply chains are ethically based, from making sure our products, services, and contracts are fair and inclusive to ensuring we support vulnerable customers, from being there for communities through natural disasters to providing support for customers in those communities during the impact of COVID, as we have done, and from ensuring our suppliers do not exploit their workers to ensuring our workplace and our remuneration systems for our people are fair and supported as well. The second is the action we take in relation to the environment. In many ways, as the provider of one of the largest platforms for the digital economy in Australia, we're already making a positive impact by enabling many businesses today to move to doing things digitally that previously they did physically.
The flip side of this, however, is that it drives extra traffic onto our network, and that in turn increases our power consumption, and it puts pressure on our environmental footprint. So much so that Telstra is one of the largest energy users in Australia. In 2020, the energy we used to power our network resulted in 1.2 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions. To put that in perspective, it's equivalent to powering about 300,000 homes for an entire year. Moreover, the amount of data that is being sent backwards and forwards on our network is growing dramatically. In 2020 alone, it grew by almost 30%. As you can imagine, the average smartphone user is unlikely to be thinking about the amount of power it takes to make a FaceTime call or stream a song or a movie, but that is exactly what is driving our energy consumption.
Our approach continues to be open about how we use energy and our impact on the climate so we can actively reduce it and encourage other businesses like ours to do the same. We have very clear targets: to reduce our absolute emissions by at least 50% by 2030, to enable renewable energy generation equivalent to 100% of our consumption by 2025, and thirdly, to make our operations carbon neutral from 2020. I'm pleased to say we have already achieved this carbon neutral goal, and we did this by purchasing 2 million carbon credits from projects that avoid or remove carbon from the atmosphere. We are now, in fact, the largest certified carbon neutral company in Australia.
We have also looked at every aspect of our business, from the fuel that we use for our vehicles to the generators at our mobile base stations, from the electricity that we use to run our network, offices, and to stores to the emissions our suppliers are using providing telecommunications equipment. 15 years of emissions reporting tells us that air conditioning, ventilation systems, power conversion, and lighting are our biggest energy users across our network sites and data centers. We're also running parts of our network with thousands of solar panels and using smart meters to help us track performance and manage the load. We're working closely with our suppliers to better understand our value chain emissions and incorporate new low-emissions products and services into our businesses so they can be as efficient as possible going forward.
These are now what's known as Scope 1 and 2 emissions, the emissions from our own business operations. But as I mentioned earlier, we also now plan to extend our 50% emissions reduction target so it applies to Scope 3 emissions as well. The third and final aspect of doing business responsibly is the role that we play in supporting digital inclusion. Our Digital Inclusion Index tells us that too many Australians are still facing real barriers to online participation, barriers that include access, affordability, and digital literacy. We're committed to playing an active role to address this, including through the significant investments that we are making in regional Australia and via a range of programs and partnerships to build inclusion.
So I hope that sets the scene for today's discussion and gives you a sense of our immediate sustainability priorities, our longer-term ambitions, and how this important work is central to our T25 strategy. Thank you. With that, I will now hand over to Lyndall.
Thank you, Andy. Thanks to all of you for joining us today. I want to use this time to do three things. Firstly, to explain what we mean when we're talking about responsible business, then to reflect on changing ESG expectations, and finally, to discuss briefly how we advance ESG issues at Telstra. What it means to be a responsible business in 2021 can mean different things to customers, employees, communities, and shareholders. For us, being a responsible business is about doing what's right, doing what's right for our customers, our employees, and the communities we operate in.
Doing this ensures we deliver value for our shareholders. It means making sure we design and sell products and services that customers understand and want to buy. It means we adopt ways of working, policies, and work practices that make us an organization where people want to work. It means understanding broader community concerns and ensuring that we maximize the positive impact for these communities and minimize any negative impact. And it means doing all of this in a way that delivers value for our shareholders. The COVID pandemic has also challenged us to adapt to find new ways of supporting our customers, our people, and the communities we operate in.
As all of us adapted to working, studying, and self-isolating at home in response to COVID, at Telstra, we moved quickly to shift our entire organization to work in a remote way over one weekend way back in March 2020. We remained productive and have continued to deliver our T22 strategy without pause. While we have had some challenges with customer support in some areas, we worked hard to address this quickly, and the rest of the company didn't miss a beat. We continued to work productively from home. We know, however, that we don't always get it right, and getting things right can be challenging when an organization is going through the type of fundamental change we've seen through T22. We know we need to improve our customer experience for all customers, not just the majority.
We also know that we need to ensure we better understand the impact of the products and services we offer and how we sell these products and services. We've not always got this right, and we have caused harm to some of our customers. We learned a difficult lesson last year when we discovered that some of our licensee stores had been selling products and services to Indigenous customers in a way that was unconscionable and caused harm to these customers. The best lessons come from the toughest experiences, and this has been a tough one for Telstra and, more importantly, a tough one for our customers. However, it led us on a journey of much broader reflection on what responsible business looks like for Telstra, and it has informed a fundamental component of our Responsible Business Strategy.
Moving to have a look at changing ESG expectations, we have experienced extraordinary change within our organization over the last few years. The world we operate in has experienced even greater change over the last 18 months. We see geopolitical tensions shifting focus onto security of Australia's key relationships and supply chains. The climate change debate has moved from a division between those who believe and those who deny onto more scientific grounds of what do we do about it and what role governments and corporations will play. Equality and inclusion is now driving thought and policies around the world, and a key challenge for all of us is how we're going to work in the future, as well as ensuring we have the skills and technology needed to operate in a more dynamic world.
The other part of this particular challenge is how do we do all of this while technological challenges outpace our laws and ways of operating, requiring skills that universities and schools struggle to keep up with and bringing new and interesting challenges. Our customers and suppliers want to understand our initiatives, our ESG initiatives, and a recent PwC survey reveals that over 80% of consumers think companies should be actively shaping ESG best practices. Our employees want to work for companies whose purpose they connect with and can see the true connection of ESG initiatives with corporate strategy. That same survey, PwC survey, reveals that 86% of employees prefer to support or work for companies that care about the same issues they do.
Communities we operate in simply don't accept that they can be ignored, and they want companies to maximize the benefits for them, such as inclusion activities for us, and minimize the negative impacts, such as the impact of climate change. Governments and regulators expect organizations to do not just what they can do legally, but what they should do. From an investor perspective, we have seen these shifts change from a focus on ESG being issues that are treated as ethical issues to them being treated as issues that create opportunities and risks for organizations.
Investors expect organizations will not only do what they can to deliver financial returns over the short to medium term, but will understand the impact of external issues on their businesses, the ESG risks and opportunities, and develop strategies which integrate the right ESG considerations for them into their corporate strategy and deliver value to them over the longer term in a more sustainable way. If you take climate change as an example, until recently, it was broadly acceptable for an Australian company to demonstrate commitment to climate change by annually disclosing their greenhouse gas emissions and setting an emissions target based on what a company could realistically achieve.
Stakeholder expectations have changed, and companies are now required to demonstrate how climate change is being integrated as a core component of corporate strategy, how climate risk is being assessed, and how emissions targets will actually achieve the goals for the Paris Agreement. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures , or TCFD, reporting framework is a great example of how stakeholders are requiring companies to assess and disclose the financial impacts of climate risks to their business. The conversation is moving beyond the climate impacts of a company to both climate risks and opportunities associated with suppliers and customers. Companies are now being assessed on how they're capitalizing on the opportunities that are available through the transition to a low-climate world, whether through helping their customers reduce emissions, developing climate-related products and services, or investing in opportunities that support the transition to net zero.
So how do we advance sustainability at Telstra? A core part of the work to develop our T25 strategy involved looking at the macro shifts we're seeing around us globally, looking at the risks and opportunities and what they mean for how we live, our purpose, and then building a strategy with a focus not just on what we can do to deliver short-term financial value, but what we should do to deliver sustainable value over the short, medium, and long term. That's why delivering on our commitments in a sustainable way, in a responsible way, is a key part of our T25 strategy. Our Responsible Business Strategy brings together how we create value from that intersection between sustainable impact and technology and energy.
The strategy, as Andy mentioned, has three core components and seeks to embed responsible business principles into every aspect of what we do, from the way we interact with our customers, suppliers, and people to the impact we have on our planet and the role we can play in increasing the number of Australians who benefit from the digital economy. Thanks, and I'll now hand over to Jules, who will take you through our approach in more detail.
Thank you, Lyndall, and hi to everyone who has joined us today. I'm joining today from Tasmania, the traditional owners of the Palawa people. I'm actually a live example of working with location flexibility, of how you can work in the executive of a large corporation that will be based on the east coast of Tasmania, the state where I was born and bred. I feel very grateful for doing what Andy had said, which is choosing where I'm able to work, and also very proud to work for an organization that enables that type of flexibility. Let's dive a little deeper on sustainability. Our Responsible Business Strategy captures our approach to sustainability.
The strategy reflects our most material sustainable topics, our sustainable development goal priorities, and our desire to build a future-ready Telstra for the benefit of our people, customers, shareholders, and the communities we live and work in. We focus our efforts in the three key areas that Andy outlined earlier. First, that trusted operations, ensuring fair and inclusive product design and fair sales practices, sourcing ethically, and managing risks in our supply chain. Secondly, digital inclusion, ensuring everyone can enjoy the benefits of being connected and using technology for social and environmental innovation. This is where our Telstra purpose particularly rings true. It's the everyone in building a connected future so that everyone can thrive. And thirdly, environmental action.
As Andy mentioned, we're a significant user of energy and have the ability to mitigate our own climate change impacts while better enabling our customers and the communities in which we operate to do the same. Our Bigger Picture Sustainability Report is our key reporting tool. Published annually, it summarizes our approach, performance against our strategic targets, and initiatives undertaken throughout the year to improve social, environmental, and customer outcomes. Along with meeting our GRI reporting requirements, it includes our UNGC Communication on Progress disclosures, as well as our TCFD disclosures. We receive many requests to respond to ESG indices each year. Indices we're recognized within include Equileap, top 200 companies for gender equality, Vigeo Eiris, top global 120 companies list, member of the FTSE4Good, Ethibel, a sustainable index excellence in their global division, the MSCI A rating, and CDP A-rating.
If there are any specific indices that you'd like us to respond to, then please let us know. Shortly, my colleagues Christie and Tom will drill further into our work regarding modern slavery and our environment strategy. Where I will dive a bit further into is digital inclusion. As part of this, I want to share with you a short video. I think it helps bring to life the concept of digital inclusion. I had the privilege a few weeks ago to travel to Far North Queensland with our Telstra check-in bus, the bright pink bus. We visited a number of remote Indigenous communities on this trip, including Mapoon and Aurukun on Cape York. This is part of a broader program of us visiting some of the most remote communities in Australia to check in, to see how we can best assist our customers in these communities.
This video gives a flavor of this program.
To go to those communities, to spend time actually out in Country, it's amazing. We're just respectful of community and respectful of what we do out there. The pink truck is very, very well known. As you walk into the bus, we've got a map of the Top End of Australia with all the pinpoints of all the communities we've been to, and it's great. It initially started in 2019, where we visited five communities around Alice Springs, and then, of course, COVID hit, and that put a stop to it for about eight months. We then started back up again in November 2020, and currently now we've visited over 100 remote communities and spoken to close to 10,000 remote customers and traveled well in excess of 35,000-40,000 kilometers by road. Certainly, 4G is the most popular form of communication in the community.
We've just connected 17 remote communities in the last 3 years with a co-investment of AUD 30 million with the NT Government. To put that into perspective, it was 17,000 square kilometers. The ability to bring that technology into some of these communities is amazing. They're not big communities, and we try and aim for communities of less than 600, 700. Sometimes we go to more, and some we go to communities of 150 people. So we're doing right across the spectrum. We've just got to go out and talk to the locals and explain to them what we're doing there.
We're out there as a community involvement to get the community to understand that we are there to help, but also spending time with the customers to understand that if they did have a bad debt with us, that it has been written off, that if they have got a debt to chase in, we'll actually manage that for them. We're actually having a relationship with the communities. That's fabulous. It's probably one of the proudest things I've ever done.
They are powerful images that remind us that distance and geographic location is one of the challenges of digital inclusion. Where we stand today, soon to close out 2021, I think it's fair to say that digital inclusion has never been more relevant. For Telstra, it's the cornerstone of our purpose to build a connected future so that everyone can thrive. As our Country looks to the digital economy to get us through the post-COVID impacts, Telstra will play a vital role in helping Australians use digital tools and technology to get back on track. However, we are also cognizant that there are still 2.5 million Australians who remain offline, nearly 1 in 10 who are not connected to digital services that are crucial to so many during the pandemic. At Telstra, digital inclusion goes right to the heart of our business.
We've been recognized as the number 1 company in the Asia-Pacific for digital inclusion by the World Benchmarking Alliance Digital Inclusion Benchmark. We're focused on supporting those in the community most at risk of digital exclusion. Those include people on low incomes, people living with disability, older Australians, regional and remote communities, and people who are experiencing unemployment, homelessness, or family violence. Our focus is on what it takes to ensure everyone is included, to ensure everyone can enjoy the benefits of being connected. Our approach is informed by the Australian Digital Inclusion Index. We're very proud of the role we have played in supporting the index from its inception in 2015 to present, where it's become the recognized benchmark for measuring the digital divide in Australia. The index provides important insights on the barriers to digital inclusion across three areas: access, affordability, and digital ability.
It's designed as an information tool to help policymakers, businesses, and community organizations take action on digital exclusion. The 2021 report, released in October, shows that although the level of digital inclusion is continuing to improve across Australia, the rate of increase is slowing, and a high level of digital inequality still exists. We're committed to measuring and also improving digital inclusion, and we do this through a broad range of programs run by Telstra and the Telstra Foundation. As called out in our FY21 highlights in our Bigger Picture Sustainability Report, through our Everyone Connected programs, we helped 1 million customers in vulnerable circumstances stay connected. We also enabled 23,000 people to receive digital capability training.
Our programs include Access for Everyone programs, which support those experiencing financial hardship. Safe Connections, which supports women experiencing domestic and family violence. Tech Savvy Seniors, which supports older Australians to build the skills and confidence to use computers, tablets, smartphones. And Deadly Digital Communities and IndigiMob, which provides community-based digital literacy and technology training in remote Indigenous communities in Queensland and the Northern Territory. I saw firsthand recently Tech Savvy Seniors being run by a local Indigenous woman for her community out of the Napranum Local Library, just out of Weipa, again Far North Queensland. It's these tailored, localized programs that get cut through on building digital ability. The Telstra Foundation Partnerships also back initiatives that build community resilience and enable young people to thrive in a connected world. Jackie will share more on the Telstra Foundation and its work later in this session.
While we're proud of our achievements to date, digital inclusion remains a shared national challenge for policymakers, for business, and community organizations. So for Telstra, there is more important work to do here. We're committed. We will continue to elevate our digital inclusion ambitions as part of T25. And this includes continuing to support 1 million customers in vulnerable circumstances to stay connected each year from FY22 through to FY25. We'll continue our significant investments in regional Australia, including a AUD 200 million co-investment fund announced earlier this year to enhance regional connectivity over the next 4 years. And we've committed for regional coverage to be expanded by 100,000 sq km of new 4G and 5G coverage, extending our reach even further. And we've committed to building the digital skills and ability for 500,000 Australians by FY25.
I'll now hand back to Brent, and we're going to open up for the first Q&A. Thank you.
Excellent. Thanks, Jules. We'll now move to the first of our two Q&A sessions. Andy, Lyndall, and Jules are all available for this first Q&A. We will hold specific questions on modern slavery, environmental leadership, and the Telstra Foundation until the next Q&A after those topics are covered in more detail. So just a reminder, you can ask questions by typing your question into the box to the left-hand side of this media player . Before we get started, just a quick note: if you are having problems with your video feed, please refresh and clear your cache. So it looks like we've got a few questions coming in. First, we might start with environment. So Andy, last year you announced your three climate change commitments. Today you announced an extension of your emissions reduction target. Why do you think it's important that Telstra takes a lead on addressing climate change?
Yeah, well, thanks very much, Brent, and thanks everybody for hooking in and for your interest. When we made that announcement last year, it was in fact almost two years ago now because it was January of 2020, we said at the time that we felt climate would be the defining challenge of the 2020s. And that was, of course, before we all experienced the very significant implications of COVID. But notwithstanding COVID, I believe it is still the defining challenge. And I think we've seen that and the whole debate arise through political circles, the event in Glasgow, and I think we can all very much see that. And of course, as a telecommunications operator, our network is basically the platform for the digital economy. And what we have seen through COVID is a dramatic increase in the usage of that.
Now, that drives a lot of energy, as I said in my opening remarks. We, therefore, are one of the significant users of energy in the Country already. Then, of course, our Scope 3 emissions, as you heard me say today, are three times greater than our own emissions. We obviously play a phenomenal role in this. I think it's critical that we are a leader because actually greater adoption of digital can have a positive impact on the environment, but it does drive energy consumption and emissions. That's why we've been bold on our targets and why we've extended them to include Scope 3 emissions as well today.
Excellent. If there are any more specific questions for Andy, now is your time. Please type your question into the box on the right-hand side. Now, there is interest in cybersecurity and privacy. So Andy, last week you announced further action being taken to block scam SMS messages. Can you explain what Telstra is doing about scam calls?
Well, look, I think just the level of malicious activity we're seeing today on networks, whether it's scam calls, malicious SMSs, malicious emails, has just grown dramatically. And I see that obviously through the role we play at Telstra, but I also chair the government's advisory board on cybersecurity. And the real trick to addressing this is what we're trying to do is create cleaner pipes. And the way you do that is you need to identify the malicious activity, validate that it is in fact malicious, track it to its source, and then block it at its source. Now, that sounds easy conceptually, but you've got to put that in the context of just billions and billions and billions of events and transactions and calls occurring on our network every single day. And the overwhelming majority of all of those are completely legitimate.
So we've got to sift through and find the ones that are malicious. As I say, whether that's an SMS, whether it's an email, whether it's a scam call, we're already blocking 300 emails a day. We're blocking 13 million scam calls, sorry, 300 million emails a month, 13 million scam calls a month. But notwithstanding that, we're just seeing the number increase dramatically because it's so easy for malicious actors, organized crime, to be able to undertake this activity because they're often doing it from offshore locations where the jurisdiction systems are not really interested in prosecuting them. So what we're doing is we're continuing to enhance our capability to get better at trying to sift through the legitimate, identify the malicious, and stop it at its source. And we will do more and more of that, but people still need to be very cautious.
If you're getting a call from somebody you don't recognize, don't take the call. If you're suspicious, put the call down. If you get a link in an SMS, it doesn't feel right, don't click it. Just think twice before you click any of those links or respond to any of those calls because unfortunately, there is so much malicious activity out there today that it is a real problem.
Thanks, Andy. One late question has come through. Can you please talk to the linkage between your renewable energy strategy and your market entry strategy?
From an energy perspective, look, why don't I make a quick comment, but then I'll maybe invite Jules and Lyndall to comment as well. I mean, one of the things that the biggest energy users in the Country is we've got a lot of experience about how we improve energy consumption. We've invested in renewable energy, and so we have a lot of experience in this space. Also, what we're hearing from our customers is customers are not necessarily happy with their current energy providers, and they very much see Telstra as a trusted partner who's already in their home providing great broadband services that can provide energy as well. And we think there's a great opportunity to link those two things. But maybe rather than hear from me, maybe Jules, I don't know if you'd like to add a comment or Lyndall.
Yeah, Andy. I think that how we've explained it is important to see that each of our commitments that we've made in relation to environment are all interlinked. So we've made a commitment to ensure that we are reducing our impact now, which is our carbon neutral commitment. We've made an impact to actually play an active role in decarbonizing the grid by our role that we're playing in relation to enabling the generation of renewable. And then we play this longer-term role. And it made complete sense in that framework for us also to extend that role that we're playing in relation to our own operations to actually our business operations through our energy retail. So I think that they are all very, very interconnected.
We see that we can play a role, particularly with this shift that is changing with consumers, to be much more conscious of the purchasing they're doing and the actual environmental impacts that are having.
Thank you for your questions. We will have a second Q&A at the end of our slot this morning. But right now, I'd like to kick off the second half of this morning's roundtable and introduce Christie Ditchburn, who will take us through our approach to modern slavery and human rights. Christie.
Thank you, Brent, and good morning. Today I will share with you how Telstra approaches issues of modern slavery and human rights. But first, some context. Globally, COVID-19 continues to impact and exacerbate growing inequality around the world. Modern slavery, the severe exploitation of other people for personal or commercial gain, is more prevalent than you may think. Telstra is contributing to the effort to eliminate modern slavery in all its forms. At the same time, we're seeing more and more countries focused on mandatory regulation to help address these human rights and to mandate modern slavery reporting. Expectations of business to act responsibly, cause no harm, and generate value for society continue to increase. In the last two years, we've seen a dramatic increase in regulation globally. Our investors, our stakeholders, and our customers are focused now more than ever before on how we manage our supply chains.
They're expecting us to deepen our due diligence, become more transparent, and drive further improvements in our responses and disclosures. Companies are subject to increased scrutiny from these groups. The digital age has given access to information globally. Workers are empowered to speak up, and technology provides them the platform to do so easily. In Australia, we are starting to see stakeholder groups publish benchmarks of companies' Modern Slavery Statements. These compare performance, report on trends, and identify areas for improvement. Our response to human rights risk, including modern slavery, is underpinned by our values and our code of conduct. We have a policy commitment to respect and support human rights, including labor rights. It is enshrined in our Human Rights Policy . We have a human rights compliance program, which identifies our human rights responsibilities and risks and embeds appropriate controls within the business to meet these.
The slide illustrates some of the key controls which we use across Telstra to manage human rights issues, including modern slavery issues, in both our operations and supply chain. We provide grievance channels to ensure issues can be raised safely and remediated appropriately. We support all of this with training. Our people are trained on human rights and modern slavery and how to respond to these issues. Our risk mapping exercise identified higher-risk activities for modern slavery, both in terms of geography and business models, as our offshore delivery partners in India and the Philippines, our retail network of licensees and dealers in Australia, and our supply chain. In our supply chain, risks are more likely in ICT products and services, construction and physical maintenance infrastructure, maintenance, branded apparel, merchandise manufacturing, horticultural products, cleaning, and waste management.
If we identify an area of higher risk for exploitation, we take various measures. One example I'd like to take you through is for our business partners in the Philippines and India. We have them sign up to our Supplier Code of Conduct and include contractual rights around this and audits to demonstrate these meet these standards through questionnaires, desktop audits, and site visits. They have their own onboarding processes that make workers aware of their entitlements and working conditions. They also have their own grievance processes and also provide their workers with access to an escalation process within Telstra. This year, we piloted a worker voice initiative with one of our delivery partners. It came about because we couldn't access the site for audit due to COVID-19 restrictions. Worker voice initiatives give us direct access to the workers themselves to hear from them about their working conditions and sentiments.
While it helped to overcome COVID-19 challenges, we also discovered the value worker voice initiatives offer in their own right. These are the people we're trying to protect, so it makes sense to focus on their perspective. Site workers have the opportunity to respond directly to a survey distributed by Telstra. Nearly every worker at the site responded to the survey. The responses have provided us with a better picture of worker sentiments and conditions at the site. It has also indicated to us areas where we need to do additional due diligence. We are developing an action plan to respond to the survey findings. This initiative has been extremely valuable to Telstra and the delivery partner, and we will be rolling it out to other sites as well. Importantly, though, we are not tackling this issue on our own.
Transparency in supply chains will increase to the degree needed only if others are also working towards it. We therefore continue to work with our industry peers to collectively raise the bar and tackle this complex issue. We are part of JAC, a global ICT industry group which shares the results of sustainability audits of common suppliers. We use JAC to increase our leverage, particularly with really large suppliers such as big-name phone manufacturers. To give you a sense of scale, we once undertook audits of a site with approximately 40,000 workers through the JAC group. The work with JAC also allows us to go deeper into our supply chain. Members include companies like AT&T, Telefónica, Verizon, and Vodafone. We are also members of GeSI, a global ICT sustainability industry group which drives greater sustainability across the ICT community.
We are members of Telco Together Foundation, which is an Australian-based telco industry group which aims to make a social contribution to Australia. All the major Australian telcos are members, and one of their three key focus areas is helping telco companies and the industry as a whole to tackle modern slavery risk. We are also members of the Modern Slavery Community of Practice run by Global Compact Network Australia. This is a small interactive forum. It aims to help Australian business navigate new developments and share learnings relating to modern slavery. It is here that we can share challenges. In October, we published our yearly Modern Slavery Statement in response to both the UK and Australian Modern Slavery Acts . We make a point each year to include a disclosure which states whether or not we have found any instances of modern slavery.
This is in the interest of transparency for our stakeholders. While we didn't find any instances of modern slavery in our operations or supply chain this year, we did find some concerning labor practices and behavior. We have reported on these and how we responded in our statement. We do this to give our stakeholders confidence that our processes are robust enough to identify issues and to illustrate to our suppliers that we are serious about this issue but willing to work with them to improve their practices and to explain how in practice we are working to improve conditions for vulnerable workers. We know the expectation on us is to improve year on year in response to modern slavery. The regulator expects it, our investors expect it, and our customers expect it. So how do we intend to do this?
We are working with our strategic suppliers to get them on board with our Responsible Business Strategy. We recently held Telstra's Responsible Business Forum for suppliers for this purpose. It is important to us to upskill and work with our suppliers. We have invested in a Know Your Supplier portal provided by Robobai. This is helping us to get a good picture, of vendor risk across Telstra. We have identified entities within our group who can use our help to improve their modern slavery response. We will provide this help. We will also reassess our modern slavery risk following the proposed Telstra restructure and additional developments in our business, such as the recently announced Digicel acquisition. As noted earlier, investor groups and others have started publishing benchmarks of companies' Modern Slavery Statements. We are reviewing these and reaching out to those who wrote them.
This way, we can identify what we are doing well on and also what we can improve on. Finally, feedback from you, our investors, is most welcome. Your insights can guide us on where we should focus our energy and what will have the greatest impact. It's another way we can learn, improve, and move the dial on this important issue. I'd now like to introduce Tom Penny, who will take us through our environment strategy and the action we're taking.
Thanks, Kristin. This year marked a significant milestone as we published our refreshed environmental strategy. Addressing climate change and improving our environmental sustainability isn't just the right thing to do. It's also good for our customers and communities, our suppliers, and also for our business. This is why our environmental strategy is important. Our environmental strategy is aimed at accelerating our ambition to tackle climate change and creating a more sustainable future by using resources more sustainably and efficiently. This is underpinned by two strategic focus areas: climate change and energy use and resource efficiency. Our three climate change and energy use goals were mentioned by Andy earlier and include to reduce our absolute emissions by at least 50% by 2030. Now, this is our headline target and drives our overarching activity.
As a large energy user, we will also enable 100% renewable energy generation equivalent to our consumption by 2025. Then, as we work to reduce our impact, we'll also be carbon neutral in our operations from 2020 onwards. Our emissions reduction target is based on our commitment to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in alignment with the 1.5-degree pathway and the Paris Agreement. As mentioned, our 50% emissions reduction target is now expanded to include our Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.
Our equally ambitious resource efficiency goals, which we announced in May this year, are to reuse or recycle 500,000 mobile phones, modems, and other devices each year to 2025, to ensure 100% of Telstra-branded packaging is made of renewable or recycled material and is fully recyclable by the end of 2022, and to increase our network waste recycling rate to 85% by 2025. Now, I'll cover the progress we've made against our targets in the next few slides. We've made significant progress on our environment ambition in the last 12 months, and I'll briefly share some of the highlights of this. We were recognized on the 2020 CDP Supplier Engagement Leaderboard and were among the top 7% of companies assessed for supplier engagement on climate change. This is based on our 2020 CDP disclosure. In March, we announced our new environment strategy and resource efficiency goals.
To progress our renewable energy generation target, we announced investment in our third PPA, the Crookwell Wind Farm. This year, we also commenced a pilot to apply a shadow carbon price to capital expenditure. This activity is helping us to accelerate emissions reduction in our investment decisions. We have also published our second TCFD report, which builds on our climate scenario development work last year in FY 2020. Next, I'll share some further detail on our progress towards reducing our Scope 1 and 2 emissions. To provide you with some context on the scale of our emissions, our network operates via more than 25,000 assets, such as mobile towers, telephone exchanges, and data centers. These are located in metro and remote regions of Australia. Now, annually, we consume about 1.4 million MWh of electricity. This makes up more than 95% of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
This is where we have an immediate opportunity to reduce our impact. At the end of FY21, we've reduced these emissions by roughly 11% or around 143,000 tons against our FY19 baseline, which keeps us on track towards achieving our 50% target. The largest contributors to this decrease have been through the progressive decarbonization of the Australian electricity grid, followed by energy efficiency and decommissioning programs across our network and data centers.
An example of the energy reduction activities we have underway is with the Flemington Exchange, where we have implemented a number of initiatives, including things like upgrading to new rooftop energy-efficient air conditioning units and outside air intake with enough cooling capacity to cool the entire site heat load, also to install a new air conditioning control system with energy-efficient controls and strategies, which is in alignment with Telstra's environmental control standards, and energy-efficient alarms set up to alert energy managers when the system is not operating effectively. Now, earlier, we mentioned that we had set a target to reduce our Scope 3 emissions by 50% by 2030. This is from an FY19 baseline too, extending our existing Scope 1 and 2 emissions target.
In FY20, our Scope 3 emissions were 3.5 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, representing Telstra's largest emission source and making up 73% of our total footprint. Our largest sources of Scope 3 emissions include our suppliers, including 41% of emissions, and the energy used by customer products like modems, which contributes 37% to Scope 3 emissions. These two categories represent the biggest opportunities to reduce our Scope 3 emissions. In response, we're actively working on improving the energy efficiency of our modems and engaging suppliers to reduce emissions through programs like the CDP Supply Chain. At the end of FY20, we reduced our Scope 3 emissions by 11%, which has largely been driven through improving supply disclosure, supplier reductions, and improvements to our modems. To continue achieving reductions in our Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, we've created our decarbonization plan. Now, three principles underpin this plan.
The first is embedding emissions reduction in our business decision-making. This is, such as financial decisions and our pilot to embed an internal carbon price as an example of this. Secondly, to reduce our energy consumption by adopting a lifecycle approach for our network across the design, use, and decommissioning of equipment, and also to transition to lower emissions energy sources like using renewable energy and hydrogen. These principles are applied across four focus areas. First is buildings and infrastructure. Improving energy use of our buildings, such as exchanges, data centers, and offices. Example activities include upgrades to heating, ventilating, cooling, lighting systems, and also the AC and DC rectifiers. In addition, to improve office energy efficiency through upgrades and building rationalization. Secondly, around our network equipment, designing low-energy consumption technology, optimizing energy consumption of existing equipment, and upgrading and replacing or decommissioning emissions-intensive equipment.
Examples of this include decommissioning of legacy energy-intensive technology, engaging network equipment suppliers to integrate energy efficiency into future technology, and leveraging data analytics and remote monitoring to reduce energy load. The third is supply chain, including education and reporting on emissions reduction across our supply base and engagement with key suppliers to set emissions reduction targets and also to incorporate into supplier contracts. A critical aspect of this is working with suppliers to disclose their climate action via the CDP Supply Chain Program. Finally, to focus on customers' products and services, including designing and developing low-emissions products and services and reducing energy consumption of our devices. A significant part of this program includes setting energy reduction requirements in the design of future modem technology.
So diving into the details of what our energy efficiency program looks like, the four main areas of activity we focus on to reduce our energy consumption include to audit and optimize. We conduct regular energy audits to inform our skilled energy managers of where the efficiency gains are and where to act on optimization opportunities. Upgrade building services assets. We have a comprehensive program of emissions reduction complemented by an energy efficiency framework to embed lifecycle principles across the life of our assets. Through this program, in FY21, we've invested AUD 8.6 million in energy reduction projects that have delivered a collective saving of 18,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. Network decommissioning. Network equipment is removed as customers are migrating off legacy services, which reduces electricity grid consumption and hence our Scope 2 emissions.
We have a targeted network equipment decommissioning program where we continue to decommission legacy energy-intensive technology. And through this, we have saved an additional 22,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent through decommissioning network equipment. And then monitoring and data analytics. We're continuing to develop our capabilities to understand how our assets are performing to help accelerate our emissions reduction. And through this, we're running a DataSwarm environment hackathon. Now, DataSwarm is a Telstra Helix program aimed at leveraging the collective strength of our data community to collaborate to help solve the larger, more complex challenges, such as emissions reduction, using data and analytics. And in addition to the progress we've made against our emissions reduction targets, we also have made some good progress with our broader climate change program. We've reduced our Scope 3 emissions by 11% in 2020.
This was the work we've done via the CDP Supply Chain Program, where since June 2020, 89% of our top 100 suppliers have reported their emissions via the program. On the renewable energy front, at the end of FY21, we've progressed 34% towards our renewable energy generation target. The announcement of the Crookwell 3 Wind Farm in June this year will take us to 46% when this comes online. We continue to maintain our carbon neutral certification as a carbon neutral organization under the Climate Active Program. Since June 2020, we have purchased 4.6 million carbon credits to maintain this certification. Now, carbon project investments in Australia include our partnerships with First Nations savanna burning projects in Cape York and the Kimberley region.
First Nations savanna burning projects combine traditional knowledge in how to read Country and knowing when to burn with high-tech hardware to perform targeted patchwork burning early in the dry season. This is when vegetation still contains that moisture. With regard to our adaptation and resilience program, in FY21, we published our second TCFD report. We completed an initial scenario analysis to better understand the potential impacts of climate change on our business across 3 key areas: infrastructure and assets, supply chain, and also customers. We did this by developing 3 climate-driven scenarios up to 2050 and used these scenarios to test the resilience of our business across a variety of time horizons, ranging from short up to 3 years to medium in 3 to 10 years and longer term, which is greater than 10 years. To help adapt to climate hazards, we've put resilient strategies in place.
For example, we've updated our climate exposure threshold criteria to determine the natural disaster risk exposure for network sites. We're revising our building standards to improve the resilience of new mobile huts. We've reviewed our battery lifecycle replacement program to better consider disaster-prone locations and our increasing stocks to temporary mobile infrastructure. In addition, our lifecycle replacement and upgrade programs will consider climate risk exposure when new assets are designed to improve resilience. We have also made some significant progress in our resource efficiency program. In May this year, we kicked off a trial with MobileMuster to expand the devices for recycling beyond just our mobile phones to include a broader scope of end-of-life devices such as modems. Following the success of this trial we ran with MobileMuster, where 80% of the e-waste recycled were modems and home phones, we've expanded our own Telstra eCycle program.
For people that can't make it into a Telstra store to recycle, they can now use the free Telstra eParcel option to recycle their end-of-life devices. We're also proud to announce that we have helped PonyUp for Good achieve a milestone of donating 500,000 meals to people in need via SecondBite. By recovering equipment from our enterprise customers, we've contributed almost 100,000 meals towards this milestone. In April this year, we launched our sustainable packaging design across our Telstra-branded portfolio. Our packaging progress is widely recognized by several awards, including the Gold Winner for the Pentawards, Gold for the Good Design Awards, and a finalist in the APCO Annual Awards.
As an example for our smart modem too, some of the flow-on benefits from the new sustainable packaging design include a 75% reduction in packaging materials, and our pallets can now fit 32% more stock, further reducing our delivery footprint. So thanks for your time. I look forward to exploring further in the Q&A. I'll now hand over to Jackie Coates.
Thanks, Tom. Today, I thought I'd share with you the story of a company that has an act of giving hardwired deeply into its history and DNA. And it's the story of the Telstra Foundation, Telstra's charity, which was launched in 2002 and has driven highly impactful tech-enabled projects in partnership with Australian charities for nearly two decades. In understanding why Telstra has its own charity, I think we need to look back 20 years, take you back 20 years when Telstra launched Telstra Foundation. And it did it because it wanted to strengthen and centralize Telstra's philanthropic strategy and its community investment programs and partnerships, really make them hum. And it also wanted to send a really strong signal that we acknowledge that we are part of the communities we live and work in, and we really do give serious thought to that.
So philanthropy has been and remains to be a long-term commitment and a real demonstration that we are responsive to key social challenges that shape the communities where we have a significant presence. Having a foundation also signals we get involved in community-led social change beyond sort of our commercial interests, our regulatory compliance, and our products and services. Telstra through the foundation works side by side with community leaders, and they're doing the hard work on the ground to drive a fairer, greener, more inclusive society for people doing it tough and for those missing out. Structurally, we're not your typical corporate foundation. We're more of a bit of a hybrid. We're a team within the sustainability, external affairs, and legal functions. We've got that great hard wire to the mothership, but we're also a registered Australian charity ourselves. We're a wholly-owned Telstra subsidiary company.
We manage a private ancillary fund. So we report to an independent board chaired by former Telstra board director Russell Higgins. Operationally, we are a very lean team of two, and we bring Telstra's philanthropic strategy to life with community partners, our foundation directors, the Telstra team, and even Telstra shareholders. So I thought I'd touch on how we work with our community partners. Civil society definitely has a place within Telstra's stakeholder management framework. And community perspectives have absolutely always been valued at Telstra and are at the heart of everything we do. And our work champions First Nations communities and all their excellence. We champion young people and their digital guides. And we prioritize projects that support disadvantaged, diverse, vulnerable, and regional and remote communities. We collaborate with nonprofits and employees, providing funding, support, training, access to industry and sector change makers, and also tech resources.
This work is not without its challenges because our purpose is to enable social change through technology. Charities may not be the first sector people think of when it comes to tech innovation. However, our experience is communities with their deep knowledge of social issues and connection to people with that lived experiences are the best place to drive digital innovation in this space. They just need more support to do that. It's kind of what Andy was talking about in terms of the journey. Charities are having a parallel journey to the one that Telstra is well and truly advancing in terms of the new ways of working and becoming an Agile organization. The challenge for nonprofits is that they're far more likely to be backed in pursuit of certainties than supported to experiment and break new ground.
So this means their ability and their capacity to develop digital products and services is often impeded from the start. So what we've done is designed a grant-making process to address this. So when we're funding early-stage digital innovation programs, all these programs receive grant funding, but they also get a great Telstra capability and coaching program wrap. And we teach charities the methodologies and the tools that they need to scope really great business cases that really go through the desirability, the viability, and the feasibility of their digital service. And we do that with our Tech for Good Challenge program. For our grants, where the projects are actually at scale or about to scale, they receive funding plus access to mentor networks and connections, which is the kind of thing that they're chasing. And for other partners, we may even just provide no-strings operational funding.
That could be such as a COVID mental health relief fund, for example. These engaged funding models really differentiate Telstra Foundation from that sort of old-school check-writing and grant reporting model of traditional philanthropy. I think it deeply embeds Telstra in some absolutely fantastic, innovative, and transparent partnerships as both a funder and also a digital guide. We've been really smart in the approach that we've taken in terms of what we focus on in our investments. There's lots of need everywhere, but all our work, while community-led, also aligns to Telstra's values and Telstra's Responsible Business Strategy. We've honed in on two pillars of the Responsible Business Strategy to shape everything that we do in the space. We support digital skills for young people and nonprofits.
So I mentioned before the work we do with nonprofits to help them build and test and scale their digital products, giving them the resources they need. But we also focus on young people to ensure they too can access the digital skills that they need for the future of work. We want to get kids coding. We work in schools to get kids coding and to create with tech. We don't want them to just consume it. And while we don't think everyone needs to be a developer or work in tech, we know that access to things like training and coding, data, and AI skills is an opportunity that's just simply not equally distributed across the Country. So we're working to address that. Our programs and partnerships are linked to Telstra's T25 strategy, in particular the digital inclusion target to upskill 500,000 Australians.
So we'll deliver 20% of that target through our programs in schools and community sector. The second area of focus that we look at also aligns with the Telstra Environment Action Pillar. So we fund tech projects that support community-led climate action. And our work in this area really focuses on the power of data because we love data in the Telstra Foundation. So we're working with partners to support First Nations, remote communities to leverage tech in their Caring for Country work to remedy and adapt to the effects of climate change. And we're building a national movement of citizen scientists using their mobiles to collect climate data for science. Lastly, our third area is we manage giving programs linked to our change-making value at Telstra. We want to provide Telstra employees with change-maker opportunities in the community and Telstra shareholders opportunities to be part of our mission as well.
We have a number of programs and partnerships that do bring our strategy to life. You can see on the slide there there's quite a few. Today, what I thought I'd do is just do a little deeper dive on one that speaks to both digital skills and community-led climate action pillars. That is our Healthy Country AI Training Partnership. We're funding a collaborative project to train Kakadu, Arnhem Land, and Cape York Indigenous Rangers and practitioners in digital technologies, AI, and data analytics so that they can adaptively manage their lands with technology. If you think about it, across the world, Indigenous people manage more than 80% of the vital ecosystems worldwide. That includes a lot of threatened species.
In our discussions with First Nations communities and traditional landowners, it was really clear that in the face of all these complex environmental land management challenges, many First Nations people were looking to access and use innovative tech in their Caring for Country digital work. This is really important work. It's done in some of the most challenging landscapes. Thinking Kakadu National Park, for example, it's half the size of Tassie. It's flush with crops in the waterways, buffalo feral pigs roaming the lands. There's extreme weather events, including cyclones, floods, and the dry. This partnership, Healthy Country AI Training Program, is a collaborative project to train the Indigenous Rangers and practitioners in how to use these tech and AI and data analytics so they can use it to help adaptively manage their lands in the face of increasing climate change and other environmental challenges.
It brings together Indigenous Rangers, North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance, and CSIRO. The work is also supported by Microsoft, the Australian government's National Environmental Science Program, and the Women in STEM and Entrepreneurship Program. I mention this because it really speaks to the collaborative approach that we have to partner and our appetite to work with our strategic technology partners such as Microsoft. It's a real coalition of the willing. NAILSMA and CSIRO have now begun the engagement and consultations and co-design with a lot of Indigenous Rangers across northern Australia. It's early days, but we are really excited by the potential of this tech training offer because it really complements the oldest living knowledge in the land. It also helps manage land and biodiversity.
And we know already that the tech is being used to support populations of animals under threat of introduced species. So it's helping boost turtle, magpie, geese populations, control wetlands infestation by weeds, and certainly really looking after these precious ecosystems. So I hope that gives you a sense of our ambition and how we also contribute to Telstra's purpose and responsible business commitments. And while philanthropy is one of many levers Telstra pulls, it is really one that's built a strong track record of genuine social and environmental impact. And it's just another way that we build trust across communities and that we can all feel really proud about at Telstra. So I'll now hand back to Brent, who will open up for Q&A. Thank you.
Thanks, Jackie. It's great to hear more on the Telstra Foundation and the work that you're doing in society. We'll now move to the last of our Q&A sort of sessions. Just a reminder, you can ask questions by typing into the box to the left of this media player. All of our speakers today are available for this Q&A, with the exception of Andy. If we don't get through all of your questions this morning, we will get back to you outside of the event . Now, we're getting some questions on board engagement. So how about we start there? So Lyndall, what engagement has the board had on climate change and environmental issues?
Thanks, Brent. Yeah, the board engagement probably covers a couple of key things. So primarily, the board does oversee our sustainability strategy, our responsibility strategy. And that will absolutely continue into T25 as it is a core pillar of the strategy. So that means that the board has complete visibility of the plan, so what the objectives are, what the roadmap is to deliver them, who's responsible for delivering them within the organization, and how we're tracking against each of those metrics. So the board will deep dive into that a couple of times a year. In the meantime, the Audit and Risk Committee has oversight over climate as a risk, both from how we're adapting to the impact on our networks and operations from climate change and how we're managing those risks, but also how we're managing the transitional impacts of climate change.
And that's specifically they do deep dive a lot into the plan that Tom took you through before. So you will have seen the waterfall on how we're going to deliver on our scope one and two, deliver on our scope one and two emissions, but also now our scope 3 emissions. And behind that waterfall is a whole plan that each part of the organization has to commit to delivering on. And so the ARC deep dives into how we're delivering on that. And then, obviously, the board oversees, following the ARC, how that is progressing. What we're seeing the shift this year has been, in addition to that, what are the opportunities for Telstra from climate change.
And this is particularly through technology enablement and how we enable customers and suppliers, and also how we build climate metrics into investments that we make through some of the startups and even through some of the things that Jackie mentioned with our foundation. And so that's going to be quite a big focus for our board specifically in the coming.
Thanks, Lyndall. I think I'll stick with this environment thing because there is some interest in sort of Scope 3. So a couple of questions here. How are you working with suppliers to reduce your Scope 3 emissions? And then can you please talk to your efforts on e-waste and plastic in your supply chain specifically?
Sure. Sure. I might kick off, and then I'll hand over to Tom to go into some more detail. We've been working with, in order to prepare for the inclusion of our Scope 3 Emissions, we've been working with our top 100 suppliers, which they represent the majority of our Scope 3 Emissions. So we've been working with them on making sure that they understand our expectations and set up in the right way to help us deliver on the Scope 3 reductions. We've joined the CDP Supply Chain Program, or we joined some time ago, and that is really at the center of our engagement with suppliers on climate. And I think we were the first Australian company to sign up to that program. And this has really created the structure for suppliers to transparently disclose their targets, their emissions reduction risks, and opportunities.
Separately from that program, we also engage directly with our suppliers and work on doing workshops with them and support them with tools and things like that to help them either avoid or reduce emissions. One of the other ways that helps, particularly in Australia, is the support in meeting our commitment to use 100% renewable energy by 2025, so green in the grid. The more we do that, that also does a lot of work for Australian suppliers because the green of the grid is the green of their energy. But I might hand to Tom to dive into a bit more detail and specifically talk about how we're managing e-waste and plastics in the supply chain.
Thanks, Lyndall. So our two big areas of e-waste in particular are around our customer devices and also our network equipment when we're decommissioning across our exchanges and our data centers. On the customer front, that's a big part of our value chain. Actually, to tackle that, we actually need to be working with our suppliers. So we, in particular, work with modem suppliers when we're designing the new modems to ensure that they're repairable and also recyclable, and also to help set up the take-back and recycling programs to ensure that those products, where appropriate, can return back to suppliers to be reused again through take-back and reuse schemes. So we're also partnering with suppliers around other recycling programs, like with mobile phones and our mobile phone providers. And so MobileMuster is a big part of that.
That's really about trying to get back those devices as well through some of those main mobile operators and to be able to reuse components or those sort of things, so sort of contributing to a circular economy approach. On the network waste and e-waste recycling in particular, we have a supplier, which is our national waste and recycling contractor. And we work very closely with them to collaborate on our e-waste recycling program. So this is across ensuring that we can decommission equipment appropriately. And there's also a huge part of our e-waste that's generated around batteries and recycling those and ensuring they go back through the supply chain to be recycled too. On the packaging front, we, as part of our Supplier Code of Conduct, we've also set up requirements to improve packaging over time.
Actually, as part of our Telstra-branded products and transitioning to our more sustainable packaging design, that's a critical part of engaging with our suppliers in that space. So without using that supplier engagement to drive down plastics and increase recycled content of cardboard, that wouldn't be possible to achieve that target. So it's really critical we're working closely with our suppliers there. Thanks, Tom. Now, we do have a specific question come through on carbon credits. So what due diligence do we undertake when we purchase carbon credits to ensure they're reputable?
Thanks, Brent. I'll take this one. So first off, we purchase carbon credits aligned to Climate Active requirements. So we're certified through the government Climate Active scheme. And that includes eligible carbon credit units like Australian carbon credits, VCUs, and CERs. So that's our first threshold level that we use. The second is actually to undertake a pretty extensive due diligence process. So this includes assessing things like the project where we're purchasing the carbon credits from, whether the carbon credits are additional, what sort of documentation is in place, the provenance of the credits, and then even looking at things like the environmental and social aspects of the project and any reputation risks, in particular, things like negative media attention associated with the project. So we also review projects based on the principles of our Supplier Code of Conduct we use for our suppliers.
And that includes things like looking at labor and human rights, health and safety, business integrity, and things like management and governance. Now, through that sort of process, we review hundreds of projects for carbon credits, and we only end up selecting a handful that sort of get weeded out through that process. And our learnings through that have actually suggested that the type of credit or the location is not always a good marker of the integrity of the credits. And looking beyond just those two things is really important to do. And just a final point, once the projects that we're assessing have got through that process, the final thing we do is try to maximize the co-benefits associated with those projects and those carbon credits.
That's things like where the project is located, how the credits were aligned to our sustainability and responsible business goals, and also things like whether it aligns to our big environmental impact areas around energy or how it complements technology or even support First Nations communities. It's definitely a multi-stage approach we go through to filter out which credits are right for us.
Excellent. I might bring this back up a level and more of a strategic question for you, Lyndall. So what do you see as one of the biggest challenges in driving your Responsible Business Strategy?
I think there are probably two, or there's two that's sort of entertaining our minds at the moment. So one is that there is so much going on in this space, and there is so much technology being explored. Our challenge is really making sure that we support investment into the right technology and the right sort of investments that do two things. One is that they do actually have that meaningful impact on climate change, but also do so in a way that delivers commercial value. And we're critically focused on ensuring we don't do one but not the other. So I think that is one of the big challenges that we're working on at the moment and ensuring that we maintain that discipline to achieve both of those things. I think the second thing is it's maintaining focus.
There was a bit of a concern that with the pandemic, there may be a slowing down in focus on mitigating the risks of climate impacts. I think it's pleasing that that really hasn't happened, at least in our society. If anything, I think we're sort of starting to see that shift in Australia where the government is very slowly sort of coming on board and corporations are actually doing more. I don't think we've lost focus, but I think there is a risk we could lose focus. I think the reality is, I'm not trying to undermine the pandemic, but the reality is we will get through the pandemic. We'll get through it in some way.
I think it remains an open question as to if we don't maintain our commitment or our focus on managing the impacts of climate change, we may not actually address that risk. I think that's still, as Andy mentioned in his session earlier today, he said climate beginning of 2020, we thought climate was the game-changing issue of the 2020s, and then the pandemic came along. I don't think that's changed. I think it still is the biggest issue of the 2020s, and we don't have the full solution to address it. We do need to maintain that focus. That's where I do think corporations, particularly corporations like Telstra, have a role to play, both because we are such a big user of energy and an emitter of carbon. We've got an absolute responsibility.
But because of the very nature of what we do and the technology we support, we've actually got the ability to do something about it. So they're probably the two things that are focusing our minds at the moment.
Excellent. Thanks, Lyndall. Now, we're getting some questions on modern slavery. So Lyndall, Christie, firstly, if you find human rights or modern slavery concerns, do you withdraw from contracts? Maybe Lyndall, to kick it off?
Yeah, thanks, Brent. So the short answer is possibly. So we don't automatically cut people off straight away. We do work with them to see and understand the particular issues and how they can actually be addressed and whether or not we can influence them. But ultimately, if either we can't influence that change or if the supplier is not prepared to make the change, then yes, they will not be suppliers that we'll continue working with. But I might hand to Christie because I think there might be a couple of more recent examples we can talk through. Yeah, so the one thing that I would add to that, we have had circumstances where we have terminated contracts where we haven't been able to get to an appropriate solution with our supplier.
But what we would generally do is set up a remediation plan with our supplier if an audit uncovered an issue. We would work with them through each of those issues until the remediation plan action points were closed out. The one other aspect I would add is that, as Lyndall said, we would much prefer to work with our suppliers when we identify issues of any modern slavery or human rights because we see that that is the best way that we can make a real difference and help the community as a whole to uplift in our performance in relation to human rights.
Thanks, Christie. Just a reminder to participants today, you can ask your questions by typing your question into the box to the left of this media player. Christie, maybe a little, maybe if you could expand a bit more on modern slavery. So can you expand on the controls you have in place to prevent modern slavery in your supply chain?
Absolutely. So core to our supplier governance framework is our Supplier Code of Conduct. So whenever we bring a supplier on board, they sign up to our Supplier Code of Conduct, which is also incorporated into the contractual terms of supply. So if there are any concerns, there are some contractual levers, as we talked about just before. But as we talked about, we would much rather work with our suppliers to remediate any concerns that we had. What we also do when our suppliers come on board is we run an enhanced due diligence screening, and we run risk assessments during the life of the contract as well. Once again, if there are any concerns that are identified, we work directly with our suppliers on those.
If we need any more detail during the life of the contract, we ask suppliers to take a supplier assessment questionnaire, a self-assessment questionnaire, and they can provide us with additional information. If we want even more information than that, we will ask them to, we will have a site audit. We conducted a number of site audits over the course of last year. Once again, if there's any concerns, we'll work with the supplier on those.
Thanks, Christie. I might just revert back to the environment. So, Tom, probably a question for you. So, what carbon price do you assume in your internal modeling?
Yeah, good question. So we're currently running a carbon price pilot, which is piloting a shadow carbon price internally, and that's applied to our CapEx expenditure specifically at the moment. The price that we're applying is actually a range of prices as part of that pilot, but the main one is $40 per tonne for carbon. The range is actually looking at things like what are the price of Australian Carbon Credit Units or international credits as well. What would be the price that we would assign to carbon to actually deliver on our emissions reduction commitments? And then also looking at carbon pricing around what are the external drivers and factors out there as well. It's absolutely worth recognizing that the external environment, those moving very quickly.
We would look to see that there's probably going to be a movement in our internal carbon price that we apply. We'll also look to be firming that up once we move from a pilot program for this into a more permanent solution internally. That price may change, but at the moment, the pilot's looking at $40 per ton.
Excellent. Thanks, Tom. Now, we do have a question on Telstra Foundation. So I saw that in your sustainability report, you donate over AUD 5 million to philanthropic activities. What are some of your focus areas? And what has the Telstra Foundation done in response to COVID? Maybe starting with you, Lyndall.
Yeah, so thanks, Brent. The AUD 5 million is AUD 5 million that is absolutely preserved for the foundation. My role or my commitment to Jackie and the foundation is to ensure that it is preserved in our budgeting and planning processes. In terms of the things that we support, they're broadly the things that Jackie outlined. Very strong focus on digital inclusion, particularly digital inclusion programs and in communities where there is some vulnerability. Secondly, looking at climate, seeing if there's some way that we can support them in a way that also address climate impacts. It has a very strong inclusion and digital enablement focus, which is consistent with Telstra's purpose to deliver a connected future so everyone can thrive. But I might hand to Jackie. She does all the work.
I might hand to Jackie to talk about some of the specific programs and also what we did during COVID.
Thanks, Lyndall. I'll start with the COVID response. Our board decided to take a really compassionate and strategic response to COVID. And so first thing we did was make sure all our partners were okay. And we suspended reporting. We extended the grants. We provided some additional funding just to sort of give them that security bubble that they could work through that period, which was really, really at that time unknown. We also looked at what are some of the social issues that were really bubbling up with COVID that had an intersection with the work we did. And one of them was clearly mental health for young people. And we have a couple of partners working in that space.
So we quickly put together a fund, an AUD 2 million fund, went for two years, and it provided extra money to those two partners to do some really innovative work leveraging digital technologies. This is really going to create a lasting legacy beyond COVID, which is terrific. In terms of some of the things that we do, as Lyndall pointed out, we're very aligned to the Responsible Business Strategy. You can expect to see from the foundation some really innovative projects using technology to help vulnerable people and also strengthen and help First Nations community development. Thanks.
Excellent. Thanks, Jackie. We've got another question come through on SDGs. So Jules probably for you. What action are we specifically taking on the United Nations on SDGs?
Yeah, it's a good question. And I think you start from this framework where there's 17 goals. And as in any type of approach to getting meaningful impact, it's really important to prioritize. So in our Bigger Picture Sustainability Report, you'll see that we originally, back in 2015, had really assessed that there were four key SDGs that we would focus on. And we recently added another one of that because of the fact that we thought it was really important that we were focusing in on responsible consumption and production. So now the goals that we are particularly focusing on is the SDG 5 in relation to gender equality and 8 in relation to the decent work and economic growth and 9 in relation to innovation, industry, infrastructure. And then, as we've talked about a lot today, the SDG in relation to climate action.
We believe that through that Responsible Business Strategy that we've outlined today, and particularly the goals, goals like assisting 1 million vulnerable customers to stay connected and goals like helping to ensure that we 500,000 Australians are uplifted in their digital ability, combined with our particularly our environment suite of actions enable us to feel like we are making solid progress in relation to the UN SDGs. Again, there's a particular extract that if any investor wants to see more information that we have provided as part of reporting on our Bigger Picture Sustainability Report this year to show how we are driving those as part of our focus. It does map very well too in terms of these focus areas of the UN SDGs to our materiality assessment that we undertake every year as well.
We ask a range of stakeholders, including investors, but also members of the community, members of our employees as well to provide an assessment of the most critical areas. Those are the areas that we continue to focus on through the SDGs as well.
Excellent. Thanks, Jules. We're getting a little more questions, follow-up questions on Scope 3. So probably a question for you, Tom. Has your Scope 3 target been verified externally?
Yeah, absolutely. So we committed to setting a science-based target through the Science Based Targets initiative last year. And as part of this announcement with our Scope 3, 50% target, we're actually confirming as well that our full Scope 1, 2, and 3, 50% target by 2030 is now verified externally by the Science Based Targets initiative . So that's fantastic. And that aligns to the 1.5 degree pathway to limit global warming and also reflects our commitment around the UN Race to Zero pledge that we made earlier in the year. So it's fantastic that we've been able to get external validation of that target as well as part of this.
Thank you. Look, thank you for your questions today. If you do have any queries on topics that we have covered or did not cover today, please get in touch. That pretty much concludes our session for today. Before wrapping things up, a quick summary of our planned sustainability engagement for 2022. Our next formal engagement will be the annual ESG survey in January, followed by the release of our sustainability report in August and Modern Slavery Statement in September. The next roundtable event, similar to today's event, is expected late November, early December. We'll continue to publish a quarterly newsletter, Sustainability Matters. Please let us know if you'd like to be on the distribution list for this newsletter. You can always find more information on our sustainability website at telstra.com/sustainability/report. Thank you for joining today and for your participation.
We hope you found this event useful, and we look forward to engaging with you on sustainability in the coming year. Thanks, and have a great day.