Nokia's Global Sustainability Head on its Net Zero Timeline

Nokia has transitioned from its well-known origins as a mobile phone manufacturer, particularly famous for its iconic ‘brick’ phone, to a leader in digitalisation and telecommunications.

Founded in 1865 as a pulp mill, the company now focuses on bridging the gap between humans and machines through advanced communications infrastructure, including cutting-edge technologies like 5G, AI and cloud solutions.

Subhagata (Subho) Mukherjee serves as the Vice President and Global Head of Sustainability at Nokia, having been with the organisation since 2008.

With a strong background in strategy and technology, he spearheads the company’s global sustainability initiatives and programmes.

Subho shares his insights, contributing to the discourse on sustainability and how technology plays its part. 

Q. What is the connection between ESG and digitalisation? 

There's always this talk about if ESG is for digitalisation or if digitalisation is for ESG. I am not in favour of taking one side or the other, but where we think the real difference to humankind can come in is what we can do with leveraging digitalisation to move the needle on ESG. 

In the world of ESG digitalisation, we believe digitalisation is one of the most powerful tools to solve some of the biggest challenges that humans are facing today on the planet, to advance humankind as well as the next level of human industrial revolution. 

Many sectors will benefit and societies from the ICT industry because we provide the power of connecting so many billions of people and so many hundreds and thousands of and millions of industries. That's where we think Nokia has a strong role. One of the reasons we are passionate about ESG and sustainability is because of the industry that Nokia is in.

My second point is a little bit closer to home. Personally, as my role in our world of sustainability, one of the biggest challenges is data. Unless we know what's happening in our operations, in our supply chain, in our products, in our customers' networks or in our entire value chain, it's impossible to make an impact. This is how the world of media has transformed. It's time that we use the power of digitalisation to transform ESG to move from a more science-based approach to impact.

Q. What are some of Nokia's biggest achievements in ESG? 

Nokia has a history of over 165 years and the company's focus and belief in an equitable society as well as the power of technology and driving a sustainable outcome for the people and the planet has always been there. I think the biggest achievement of Nokia, irrespective of which year we are in, is that focus and the belief in the company's purpose.

A few things that we are really proud of this year is we have taken a company wide effort to accelerate Nokia's Climate journey. Earlier this year we announced a 10 year acceleration for our net zero target from 2050 to 2040. Now we have now submitted our roadmap to the SBTi for validation for net zero across our value chain, Scopes 1, 2 and 3, by 2040.

In the same submission, we have also changed our near term target for 2030 to completely decarbonise our own operations. This is of course a journey and this hasn't been just done loosely. It has been done with close to a year long effort to make sure that we have a line of sight and a clear roadmap across our products, our supply chain and our own operations.

In the same submission, we have also changed our near term target for 2030 to completely decarbonise our own operations.

This is of course a journey and this hasn't been just done loosely. It has been done with close to a year long effort to make sure that we have a line of sight and a clear roadmap across our products, our supply chain and our own operations.

A really big part of our emissions is in Scope 3. Our mobile networks business, which is one of the largest businesses we have, has been able to reduce its 5G base station average power consumption by 50% since the baseline of 2019. We are in the middle and early stages of 5G rollout, but between 2019, when the first 5G based stations were up, and already now we have been able to reduce 50% of power consumption. I think that is a big step forward because of course our data consumption rates across the world are going up every day. 

Q. How were you able to bring forward your net zero goal?

What really changed is the fact that we are living on a planet where every month, almost for the last several years, the world is heating up. We as humans are living on a planet where we have crossed several global thresholds. This is not just a thing of what will happen to our next generation and us, it has a near term impact on businesses. So the impact of climate change on almost all possible industries is significant and sometimes we are not able to think through what the real impact of the climate changes and think about our industry. 

Billions of people depend on the networks that we put in. So we make the hardware and the software, we do the entire R&D, then the service engineers of our supply chain, depending upon where you are, they go up on these towers or on top of the building to the base stations. We know this year we had, particularly in the global south and many of the Asian countries, terrible global warming effects. For a long time we had already seen this in our value chain, that it's been almost impossible to have our service engineers work in the middle of the day.

There is an impact on every company, every industry, every value chain. Today, not a hundred years from now. Our supply chain has an impact, our operations as an impact and the building that I'm in right now has an impact. So climate change is a business issue. 

The reason we had to accelerate our net zero target is because climate change is a business issue for Nokia. It is a business issue for our customers. We serve more than 600 global telecom operators. We serve more than a thousand enterprises in different industries. Energy sector, manufacturing, transportation, logistics, mining. Many of those sectors are exposed to climate change even more than the ICT sectors.

If, as a player in the ICT industry, we don't accelerate and leap forward to bring the target to 2040, we can't expect the energy sector to take the benefit of it and reach the Paris agreement goal of 2050. Our main motivation is can we drive leadership and do everything we can so that we can advance and make sure our customers reach the climate goals under the Paris Agreement?

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