DEVELOPMENT OF A COMPOSITE INDEX TO MEASURE ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY IN THE TELECOM SECTOR: A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TOWARDS CARBON EMISSION REDUCTION

Telecommunication provides the infrastructure to deliver core services but contributes to extensive CO2 emissions. The related efforts focus mainly on Scope-1 and 2 emissions but ignore Scope-3 emissions. The carbon emission reduction policy in emerging economies like India is limited to voluntary disclosures lacking any benchmarked index. To address the problem, this paper introduces environmental sustainability index for the Telecom sector to reduce carbon emissions. 

The present work identifies the most critical factors that reduce carbon emission in a multiple stage telecom supply chain through an extensive literature review, followed by developing an environmental sustainability index to measure carbon reduction efforts. First, an extensive literature review of four significant dimensions of telecom, namely, (a) Equipment supply chain, (b) Operation supply chain, (c) Service supply chain, and (d) Role of management, is done to identify the significant initiatives towards carbon emission reduction. A detailed survey was conducted among the personnel of the Indian telecom sector to understand the initiatives for carbon emission reduction. The study employed factor analysis and multiple regression to achieve its objectives and proposes a framework for carbon emission reduction through the environmental sustainability index. As a case, the index is used to benchmark the sustainability of a large telecom service provider.