Customer Care

Climate Strategy

Issue Date:2021/06/28

Climate Change and Environmental Risk Management

Adopted at the end of 2015 and went into effect at the end of 2016, the "Paris Agreement" is the latest version of the Global Climate Agreement following the Kyoto Protocol. The "Paris Agreement" not only agglomerates the global consensus on climate change, but also reflects how the countries facing the challenges of sustainable development are dealing with the issue. Greenhouse gas emissions have slowly become the inevitable direction with the global trend. Under the driver and influence of the government, foreign investors, financial institutions and rating organizations, enterprises have been urged to establish corporate carbon management strategies, goals and actions in a more science-based way.

Although Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations nor a contracting state of the United Nations Climate Convention, based on the responsibility of the Earth Citizens and a part of the global supply chain, we also face the potential risks of climate change and the pressure of energy saving and carbon reduction. Therefore, the Taiwan Legislative Yuan has adopted the "GHG Emission Reduction and Management Act" in 2015 and sets out the objective of reducing “Greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 by 50% or more compared to 2005", and the objective will be reviewed and adjusted every five years in the future. This action is the determination of voluntarily reducing carbon emission that Taiwan declares to the international community. On October 8, 2018, IPCC released the “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C,” and the Taiwan government has complied with “The Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Management Act” for the first time to provide for specific carbon reduction actions from 2018 to 2020. Combined with the overall carbon reduction strategy blueprint for the country, it will decrease the first stage of the greenhouse gas emissions control target of 2% in 2020 compared with 2005.

If Chunghwa Telecom does not immediately respond to the climate change issues and relevant environmental laws and regulations and systems, there may be risks of legal penalties and losing the industry leading edge at the same time. Faced with the challenges of stakeholders and damaging corporate reputation, therefore, we deeply understand the importance of climate change issues. The following illustrates the potential risks and opportunities of climate change and how we manage the issues
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Climate change may cause the following risks to operations:

1. With the impact of the greenhouse effect, global warming and extreme weather intensified, Taiwan has faced more severe threats from typhoons and floods in recent years. In some areas, due to the water shortage crisis, it has also seriously affected the water usage of industry and people's livelihood; therefore, it is necessary to invest more resources in natural disaster prevention, post-disaster facilities maintenance, operational energy access, etc.

2. Following the implementation of the "GHG Emission Reduction and Management Act," our country will conduct greenhouse gas emissions control in the future, open carbon rights and carbon trading. Since the daily network and facilities operation are dependent on a large number of energy support, followed by increased operating costs, the Company’s finances will certainly be affected. 
 

Responding Strategy

The core competence and technology under our control may be the key to "energy saving, carbon reduction" for the industry in the future, facing the coming of mobile and cloud era, in simple terms, we applied the strategy with two aspects of internal and external, and committed to practice in assisting the industry moving toward the vision of environmental sustainability.

CHT is using the "Corporate Core Competencies" to develop energy-saving and carbon-reducing products to serve the community and consumers. We promote the concept of environmental sustainability through internal and external strategies and communicate with consumers and all stakeholders through the issuance of the "Corporate Social Responsibility Report" to comprehensively and systematically organize all efforts in the environmental sustainability.

(1) Internal; we use the organized and systematic approach to set up the "Corporate Environmental Sustainability Strategy and Objectives" to implement the environmental actions, and with self-developed environmental information system to manage all the environmental information.

(2) External; we implement "Green Products and Services" to provide enterprises with professional energy-saving technologies and services to assist the industry easily achieving the purpose of energy saving management. 

We have used many years of experience in the development of the "Electricity Environment Monitoring and Information Communication System", in addition to integrate and monitor energy consumption equipment in various areas of the building, use the cloud platform to provide customers with energy efficiency calculations, equipment operation status and immediate notification to achieve the predictability and prevention mechanisms, to assist the enterprises reducing energy-saving and carbon-reduction threshold, and furthermore to achieve the objectives of energy-saving and carbon-reduction. 

 

Opportunities and Actions

With the current trends associated with global climate change, the mitigation of greenhouse gas emission has become a critical issue in global economic development since the Paris Agreement entering into force and the UN proposal of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
To facilitate the transparent disclosure of climate risks and opportunities, Chunghwa Telecom became the first telecom company in Taiwan to sign on as one of the 513 supporters of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) initiative. Our 2019 Corporate Social Responsibility Report also discloses climate change-related information in accordance with the suggested frameworks of TCFD.


CHT Climate Change Risks

CHT Climate Risks Matrix

 

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