Telstra’s low-cost mobile and internet company Belong is in the middle of a nationwide advertising campaign that is memorable for its imagery of a sliced-off bloodless thumb crawling up a snow-driven mountain.
“The average Australian is estimated to scroll the height of Everest on their phone every month. That’s why we proudly offset our network emissions,” the advert declares.
Belong reminds customers often on its website that it is Australia’s “first carbon-neutral telco”. An advertising executive said their campaign for the telco showed “that with Belong’s carbon-neutral mobile and internet, you can feel good about scrolling”.
That carbon neutrality, like that of its parent company Telstra, is certified through the government’s Climate Active program, but relies almost entirely on buying large quantities of overseas carbon offsets.
Companies globally are coming under scrutiny for relying on offsets to meet climate pledges. A UN expert group has said offsets should only be used as a last resort after companies have made actual direct cuts.
So how did Belong get to claim it was carbon neutral?
According to disclosures made to Climate Active, over three years from 2018/19 to 2020/21 – the most recent periods available – Belong’s in-house efforts (such as optimising heating and cooling systems and upgrading equipment) led to a reduction of just 1,652 tonnes of CO2. But the annual savings actually went down in that time from 816t in the first year to 377t in the third year.
Over the same period, the company bought 201,933t of carbon offsets to cover the rest of their emissions. More than 80% these offsets were created in 2014 by a windfarm in China.
In a statement, Telstra said Belong’s next report to Climate Active would show a further 4,790t of CO2 of emissions reduction between financial year 2021 and 2022.
This reduction reflected “continued progress in targeted emissions reduction activity” towards a target to cut absolute emissions by 50% by 2030. “To date, 14% of this target has been achieved, largely as a consequence of significant investment in energy efficiency.”
Belong also offers secondhand phones, allows customers to keep using their own modems and encourages mobile phone recycling.
First Nations first?
Belong said in a company blog in late 2021 that as it “started moving towards certification” its chief principle was “three words with a lot of meaning: First Nations First”.
But that hasn’t been the case when it comes to which offsets the company has chosen. Just 320t – or 0.16% – of its offsets over the three years relate to one Indigenous-led project in Queensland.
A Telstra spokesperson said: “The ‘First Nations First’ line is not something that we have ever used in our marketing or advertising and we acknowledge and agree it was wrong for it to be used in this way and given such prominence in the blog.”
A statement said Telstra and Belong did “an enormous amount of work with and for First Nations’ communities”, and consults and takes “advice from indigenous stakeholders inside and outside the company, including on our environmental programs”.
Telstra’s carbon neutral claim
Belong’s owner, Telstra, also uses Climate Active to claim it is a “carbon neutral” organisation. In the six months from January to June 2021, Telstra bought 1.01m tonnes worth of carbon offsets.
But apart from buying offsets, what did the company do to cut emissions?
Telstra has a target to cut its “absolute emissions by at least 50% by 2030”. The company’s disclosure to Climate Active says it spent $8.6m on “energy and emissions reduction initiatives” to deliver an annual saving of 10,413 tonnes – just over 1% of the cuts the company claimed from buying offsets (for context, Telstra made about $3bn profit that year).
Only about 7% of the offsets Telstra bought were Australian, with the bulk of the rest from renewables projects in India.
Dr Alex Lo, of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, published research this month on the use of renewable energy projects as offsets. About 38% of Telstra’s offsets were related to Indian solar energy projects from 2019 and 2020, which Lo says “require scrutiny”.
One critical factor for a project to generate carbon credits is it must be “additional” – that is, the project would not have happened without investments through the carbon market.
Lo says solar power prices in India dropped by about 85% between 2010 and 2019 while at the same time, international carbon prices were low, “which means credit incomes can hardly be seen as a key driving force of project development”.
Telstra said it did “not agree” its carbon offsets were not additional, and the company carried out extensive due diligence. “All Telstra projects are additional,” the statement said, adding it viewed carbon offsets as a “temporary ‘bridge’ measure”.
The company said it expects the proportion of offsets linked to renewables to “diminish over the coming years, as we shift our efforts to developing and maturing markets for nature-based solutions”.
The company had a target to “enable renewable energy generation equivalent to 100% of our consumption by 2025” and had bought a farm to plant 150,000 native trees and shrubs that would sequester about 160,000 tonnes of CO2 over the next 25 years.
Coral claims
The shadow environment minister, Jonathon Duniam, accused the government last week of ignoring a report on the health of the Great Barrier Reef from the marine park’s management authority that showed the reef had been in “good health for a number of years now”.
The report did say the reef had been through relatively benign years, but warned the threats from the climate crisis were “escalating”.
Speaking to Sky News Australia’s Outsiders program, Jennifer Marohasy, an Institute of Public Affairs fellow, said the reef was in great health and questioned reports from John Brewer Reef near Townsville during last year’s mass coral bleaching – the first mass bleaching, authorities said, in a usually cooler La Niña year.
Marohasy visited John Brewer in April “to have a look at the corals” and said “by coincidence” scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (Aims) were also there conducting an underwater survey.
“They reported zero bleaching,” said Marohasy, saying this was despite aerial surveys reporting 60% of corals bleaching at the same site. “It’s crazy,” she said. This was “disinformation” said presenter Rita Panahi.
Is it?
Aims told Temperature Check they did not carry out any in-water monitoring in April, when Marohasy visited, but had been in the water on 6 March – nine days before aerial surveys recorded 60% bleaching on the reef flat.
That in-water survey found “coral bleaching was variable in different parts of the reef”, Aims said, with some parts of the reef showing no bleaching and others between 10% and 30%.
The amount of heat stress faced by the corals jumped in the nine days between the in-water survey and the aerial survey.
So was it “crazy” that aerial surveys had a different result than in-water checks that involved divers being pulled for two-minute bursts 81 times around the reef’s 15km perimeter?
Aims said the same results shouldn’t have been expected, because they came from different times, used different methods and examined different parts of the reef (in-water surveys included deeper corals but aerial surveys only counted corals in the top 6m of water).
An Aims statement said: “While there are differences between the results, the in-water survey results on 6 March 2022 correlate reasonably well with the aerial surveys on the 15 March.
“It is important to note that peak heat in 2022 for the [reef] occurred on 14 March. If one visited John Brewer Reef in April, about a month after peak heat stress, conditions may have cooled and corals would have been on a path to recovery from moderate levels of heat stress.”
