Energy and carbon

Climate change strategies

In 2010, TELUS announced our climate change emission and energy reduction targets. We undertook a two-year process of rigorous analysis and consultation with various stakeholder groups. Our efforts reflect the emphasis we are placing on greater sustainability and strengthening our position as a leading corporate citizen. Moving forward, we plan to fully integrate our climate change targets into TELUS’ triple bottom line approach to business decisions, which will help us successfully execute our strategy.

Over time, the need to implement a climate change strategy has grown in importance for TELUS. We generate greenhouse gases and, as a result, we have a responsibility and an opportunity to do our part in reducing our emissions and those of our partners. We also need to understand and address climate change from a strategic perspective. Without a proper strategy and plan of action to address issues such as natural disasters due to climate change, we may put our business at risk. Our new climate change strategy has three primary components – mitigation, adaption and innovation. Each component has its own set of goals.

Mitigation

• 25 per cent absolute reduction below 2009 levels in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020
• 10 per cent absolute energy reduction below 2009 levels across our operations by 2020
• New eco-efficiency targets tied to customer connections measures and megabits.

Adaptation

• Enhance our business continuity planning in order to address the impact of adverse changes in climate such as flooding and forest fires
• Address our risk insurance program to cover new and emerging climate change-related risks.

Innovation

• Go to market with solutions and technology that will help TELUS, our customers and our partners in the community realize their climate change goals.

We have already begun implementing some key strategic activities to address our energy and emission footprint. We have hired an energy director to lead our energy reductions, and have begun retiring old equipment. As well, we have started real estate building retrofits, installing more efficient network and server equipment, real estate consolidation and team member education. As our strategy to meet our targets evolves, we will track and report our progress.

TELUS’ energy footprint

We continue to categorize energy consumption (kWh) in three main categories (based on World Business Council for Sustainable Development Greenhouse Gas Protocol):

• Scope 1 or direct energy sources (such as fuels that include natural gas, gasoline, diesel, propane and heating oil)
• Scope 2 or indirect energy sources (such as electricity)
• Scope 3 or other energy sources (such as air travel).

The core of our energy footprint is tied to the use of electricity in our administration buildings, data centres and network infrastructure. In 2010 we continued to work on improvements and addressed:

• Our real estate footprint and implementing the Work Styles program
• Network transformation and equipment upgrades
• Data centre efficiency projects that provide heating and cooling efficiencies
• LEED building design in our new real estate holdings
• Internal education to team members
• Travel reduction.

Our 2010 results

Our total energy use in 2010 increased over 2009 by four per cent. Our indirect energy consumption increased by eleven per cent, while our direct energy consumption decreased by eight per cent. Throughout 2010, we focused on efficiency improvements, including fleet management improvements, real estate upgrades and LEED building construction, and network and technology infrastructure changeover. In 2010, we also rolled out TELUS Optik TV™, increased our total customer connections base by three per cent, and experienced business and network growth.

As we start to work toward our climate change targets, we expect that our total energy consumption will decrease in future years. Since 2008, we have worked to reduce team member travel by encouraging the use of teleconferencing and videoconferencing technologies, such as Cisco Telepresence. This has resulted in the continued reduction in energy use associated with air travel. Our total energy related to travel decreased by 12 per cent in 2010 over 2009.

For the second year in a row, we have included our operations in the Philippines in our 2010 energy disclosure. While the results from the Philippines will not be part of our assurance values this year, our goal is to have the systems in place for assuring in 2011.

Since 2001, TELUS has set eco-efficiency targets (kWh/Revenue). In 2010, our target was a two per cent improvement relative to our total revenue. We did not achieve this target as our eco-efficiency was 0.11 kWh/$ for 2010, which is a 2.5 per cent increase over 2009. This year, we have included a new eco-efficiency ratio that we will start to track and compare year over year in addition to our revenue-based eco-efficiency number. We will report on our energy consumption (kWh) to total customer connections. For 2010, our customer connection eco-efficiency is 84 kWh per customer connection.

Carbon disclosure

In 2010, TELUS was named a Carbon Disclosure Leader by the Conference Board of Canada and the Carbon Disclosure Project, in the Canada 200 category for our excellence in climate change reporting. Over the past several years our greenhouse gas (CO₂e) emissions have fluctuated within a narrow range. In 2010, our total emissions increased by five per cent, a trend we are looking to reverse over the next 10 years through our climate change strategy. Our direct emissions decreased by eight per cent and our indirect emissions increased by nine per cent. Our total scope 1 and 2 CO₂e emissions for 2010 were 352,000 metric tonnes compared to 335,000 metric tonnes in 2009.

This increase in our emissions can be explained by the fact the Environment Canada increased the emission factor related to the energy grid for Alberta. If the emission factor had not changed, our emissions would have remained virtually the same as the previous year. This is supported by the fact that our overall kilowatt hour consumption remained relatively the same as 2009 enterprise wide.

Our Scope 3 emissions, which we define as air travel emissions, continuously declined since 2008. In 2010, these emissions dropped by 11.5 per cent over 2009, and since 2008 they have declined by 36 per cent.

Our CO₂e efficiency target for 2010 was a two per cent improvement over 2009. Our target was 0.034 kg/$revenue. Our actual efficiency was 0.036 kg/$revenue, which is a three per cent increase from 2009, resulting in our target being missed.

Conference solutions and reducing our energy footprint

Since we began reporting on this metric in 2001, we have seen continuous improvement in our emissions avoidance. One of our strategies to offset our emission contribution is to invest resources in the promotion of video and teleconferencing as an alternative to travel for meetings for both team members and customers, and to reduce work commutes for team members through Work Styles.

In 2010, we continued to increase our telephone and video conference usage with an eight per cent increase in overall usage of both systems combined. Below are statistics for CO₂ and pollutant avoidance for both TELUS' internal operations and our customers from the use of our video and teleconferencing tools. While this is a commonly used approach to estimate emissions avoidance associated with telecommunications technology, there is a risk that the data provided does not accurately reflect the actual results associated with using these services. The number of participants, the distances travelled, and the mode of transportation can all vary greatly, especially in a company such as TELUS with national and international operations. However, we have aligned our methodology with that of Environment Canada’s to estimate the CO₂ avoidance.

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