Businesses are uniquely positioned to drive meaningful climate action, making the role of Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) and ESG leaders vital yet often challenging. Our column in collaboration with Four32 is here to inspire those working to make a real impact within their organisations. Each month, we’ll bring you insights from a CSO, sharing 4 strategies, 3 challenges, and 2 sources of inspiration to help you on your journey.

An unspoken hero in mitigating climate change is one so ubiquitous it fades into the background: internet connectivity. It’s essential for monitoring and tracking environmental data like carbon dioxide levels (you can’t manage what you can’t measure), and acts as the lynchpin for global collaboration and innovation – to come up with smart technologies and solutions for the climate crisis. As Abby Chicken, Head of Sustainability at OpenReach, says: “Tech underpins what we need for decarbonisation”. 

OpenReach is the UK leader in providing connectivity to the UK. They connect homes, schools, hospitals, banks, governments and businesses large and small to the world. Their mission is simple: to ensure that everyone in the UK can be connected with the highest quality of service. Abby’s role is two-fold: first, to ensure that Openreach can bring internet connectivity throughout the UK as sustainably as possible – by reducing their carbon footprint, using fewer materials and reducing waste, and protecting the natural habitats they encounter. Second, to deliver reliable, high-quality internet to the communities they serve, enabling UK citizens to effectively work on finding solutions to the climate crisis. We spoke to her to find out how she is tackling both in her role. 

Here are 4 wins, 3 challenges, and 2 sources of inspiration from Abby Chicken, Head of Sustainability at OpenReach, to consider this week.

Four Wins

1. Technology’s role in solving the climate crisis

On a macro level, the Openreach mission – to connect the nation to full fibre broadband – is a resounding win, as I believe it genuinely helps to find solutions to the climate crisis. Tech underpins what we need for decarbonisation, whether it’s reducing travel or the material footprint of things, or enabling smart technology and AI. 

2. Reducing unnecessary groundwork

A great deal of innovation has gone into the Openreach teams reducing their material use – we call this ‘Civils Avoidance’. These techniques are, very simply put, ways to reuse existing infrastructure or methods to avoid invasive digging. It saves money and it saves time, it helps us deliver our product more efficiently and with better customer service, but from my perspective, it fundamentally aligns with our sustainability goals: lowering our emissions, using less and wasting less, and limiting our impact on nature. 

3. Action starts with measurement

Over the past year, we have been carbon footprinting two of our main services. It’s a beast to measure and has taken an enormous amount of data gathering and time. We are the first company in the UK to footprint broadband infrastructure; this will give us the data we and our customers need to understand where to take action. 

4. Our partnership with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds

This one is perhaps my favourite because the sweet spot between corporates and charities is mission alignment – finding something that is mutually beneficial. We have a business conservation partnership with RSPB. They struggle to find people who can work at height to put up nest boxes for swifts, a bird on the endangered list. We realised we had something unique and valuable to offer; now our engineers are volunteering to install these boxes. 

Three Challenges

1. Communicating sustainability as a priority 

Like in most businesses, the sustainability team is constantly competing for attention and bandwidth. Of course, cost is a significant one, but it can even be airtime on meeting agendas in our internal communications. It’s especially difficult when you need to convey a lot of information to cut through. 

We take the ‘aikido’ approach. Aikido is a martial art which uses the momentum of the opponent; it translates as “the way of combining force”. So, if cost-cutting is a priority, we show teams how to reduce their material consumption and bag that as a win. If engagement is a priority, we get them to volunteer for nature, and if teams are spending a lot of time recovering from storm impacts, we talk to them about climate resilience.

2. Getting the numbers

Data integrity is probably the biggest challenge for my team. Having accurate numbers so we can understand where action needs to be taken seems so straightforward, but in practice involves a huge amount of action across multiple departments and takes a frustrating amount of time. I’m sure this will be familiar to everyone in sustainability tasked with reporting!

3. Choosing what to do

My own personal challenge is being able to say no to things when the mantra of “everyone, everywhere, all of the time” is ringing in my ears. There are so many things we could do, and we probably should do lots of them, so filtering it down to where we have capacity and budget to have a meaningful impact is a great discipline.