Sustainability - environment

Footage: Dark sky with lightning strikes accompanied by intense, urgent music. Screen changes to a devastating bushfire burning along a coastline, then a flooded town, then a coral reef, then a dry, barren landscape.

Audio - Vicki Brady: Australia's feeling the effects of climate change more than any other developed country in the world and we're seeing it first hand, whether it's extreme heat to bushfires more intense than we've ever seen before, to floods and the rainfall.

Importantly, here in Australia, we have some world leading technology at our disposal. I think we've got a really important part to play into the insights and what we do to really change the world to be able to address climate change. 

Cut to Telstra CEO, Vicki Brady speaking to camera with accompanying text: "Vicki Brady CEO, Telstra". 

Cut to title card of video: "Vision 2045". 

Audio - Vicki: Telstra is Australia's largest telecommunications company and very proudly, we've been serving Australians for more than a hundred years. So, we connect Australia coast to coast - east to west.

That's a bit over 4,000 kilometres and our networks reach about 99 percent of the population. We connect Australia and that takes a lot of power. In fact, we're the 13th largest scope 2 emitter in the country. 

So, in terms of the role we play in reducing our own carbon footprint as a company, some examples of that: firstly, we've invested about a billion dollars supporting renewable energy projects here in the country, and that includes most recently, signing a power purchase agreement with the largest wind farm in southeast Queensland.

Secondly, we're focused on reducing our own emissions and that's through things like looking at our air conditioning, looking at our consumption of power at our various sites, and then I think most importantly, the role we can play, helping enable our customers. How do they reduce their emissions? We can play an important role in the transition to a low carbon future. 

Footage as Vicki speaks: Montage of iconic Australian locations - Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge, cars travelling along a red, outback road and a beautiful beach. Also, a windfarm at sunset, shown from different angles and sweeping across an outback landscape and telecommunications tower, then a mountain at sunrise.  

Cut to new person, speaking directly to camera with accompanying text: "David Burns - Group Executive, Enterprise, Telstra".

Audio - David: Telstra as a Telco exists in over 20 countries around the world. So we have an opportunity with our products and services to make a real impact to emissions. In Australia, we have an ambition to reduce emissions by 43 percent by 2030 against the 2005 baseline. Deloitte found that we can help our customers avoid seven times our own emissions by 2030. That’s the equivalent of avoiding 4.3 million tonnes of emissions per year, or the equivalent - which gets me super excited - of 1.3 million cars off Australia's roads.

So, by using technology, products and offerings, we think we can help those customers make a real impact. Let me use a few examples, in particular, in our digital technologies.

Cloud computing. It's incredibly more efficient than on-premise computing. In fact, cloud computing can reduce up to 80 percent of emissions versus on-premise computing.

IOT. We're applying it to mines, factories and utilities to create efficiencies to track their resources, track their operations and make a real impact to how they're executed.

Farming. Again, we're tracking resources and their operations including down to the animals themselves in those instances to help that be a more efficient operations and reduce emissions.

Telematics. We're using it in the transport industry to help maintenance and driver efficiency. We're applying that to some of the world's largest business problems. An example of this is we've partnered with Farmbot, an Australian agri-tech business. They specialise in monitoring of water-based assets. That helps farmers manage their assets remotely, such as pipes, dams, troughs, etcetera. It makes them more efficient; they don't need to visit those sites as often as they used to. We send real-time alerts to their phone or tablet or other device and enable them to manage these assets and manage their farms more efficiently, with less travel and less commuting across their properties. 

It's these sorts of technologies where we're partnering as a telecommunications and technology provider to help farmers in Australia reduce their emissions. 

Footage as David speaks: Montage of factories emitting smoke, gridlocked cars on a freeway, digital technology cloud screen, giant computer servers and mining in quarry. We also see farmers using tech in a field, cows in a paddock, roads and overpasses, trucks travelling along a highway, a blue cloudy sky, a farmer tending to his water troughs, the same farmer looking at the real-time alerts on his mobile phone and a different farmer with the Farmbot device. We end with an aerial shot of a sprawling cattle farm. 

Cut to new person, speaking directly to camera with accompanying text: "Lyndall Stoyles - Group General Manager Sustainability - External and Legal, Telstra".

Audio - Lyndall: The carbon farm is essentially an experiment. And it's an experiment where we trial different technologies and we do that to see if we can create ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere, store carbon from the atmosphere, but also reforest land and create carbon offsets in the process. 

We plan to plant around one hundred and sixty thousand native trees and that should allow us to store around one hundred and sixty thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide over the 25 years of the project. 

Footage as Lyndall speaks: Farmer standing on green hillside and sweeping images of lush green countryside. 

Cut to new person, speaking directly to camera with accompanying text: "Ben Burge - Member of the team, Telstra".  

Audio - Ben: A hundred and fifty years ago, this place on the New South Wales tablelands was a forest. It was heavily cleared to become a sheep station and in 2022, Telstra bought the farm with a plan to return it to a permanent forest state.

Instead of allowing food waste to go into landfill, where it rots and creates methane, we teamed up with a company called Barty, who processes that food waste by allowing maggots to feast upon it so it creates an insect-based food source but also a probiotic fertiliser. We take that maggot faeces product and create a seed bomb. That seed pod gets delivered by a targeted drone delivery system. It's an automated method of planting a forest. It's been great working with Air Seed on this project. We've got a lot of hilly regions, rocky regions where conventional planting is not viable and so an automated method of dropping seed bombs from the sky was particularly suited to this initiative. We see an increasing role for technology in planting, weeding, monitoring and verification.  

Apart from getting hotter, Australia's been ravaged by the loss of biodiversity. Projects like this establish biodiversity corridors for the protection of native fauna like wallaroos and wallabies. This project is an example of the nature-based solutions that will be a critical part of the global solution to climate change.  

Footage as Ben speaks: green farm with tin sheds, men walking through grassy hills, maggots feeding on food waste, hand with soil running through its fingers, seed bombs being dropped into Air Seed drone, drone dropping the pods over fields and montage of images across fields at sunset. We also see scenes of koalas in trees, kangaroos in paddocks and wallaroos and wallabies. 

Audio - Lyndall speaks again: Australia is a country of really vast and beautiful places and a country that has many valuable natural assets in it. Our actions and the way we've managed the country has led to really quite dramatic habitat loss and species loss to the point where some of our iconic species are now becoming extinct. 

Our Telstra Foundation has partnered with a  number of different organisations. One of the more recent projects we've engaged with is with the leading Australian science agency, CSRIO, and a First Nations agency, NAILSMA - the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance.

One of the programs is the healthy country AI  program and we've co designed the program that trains local Indigenous rangers and trains them to use drones and other technology to manage the land, including monitoring the way in which feral animals can destroy local waterholes. These programs are really exciting. They're exciting because they take ancient, ancient knowledge continuing to this day and combine it with modern day science and technology to find solutions to really tackle this challenge of habitat and species loss. And doing so in some of the most remote parts of the world. 

Footage as we cut back to Lyndall speaking: outback landscape, native cockatoos and bilbies, koalas in trees, men on quad bikes in bush, Indigenous rangers inspecting land and using drones, helicopter landing and more remote outback locations. 

Audio - Vicki speaks again: At Telstra, our purpose is all about creating a connected future where everyone can thrive. And I truly believe, for us to face into climate change and solve it, technology's going to play an incredibly important part.

So, our role in that, it is absolutely using our voice to advocate for change. It's absolutely in the actions we're taking directly to reduce the impact we're having on the environment.

I think when you bring the power of technology together with the will to want to change the world, we can absolutely look forward to a much brighter and more sustainable future.

Footage as we cut back to Vicki speaking: windfarms at sunset, Dad walking toddler though leafy park, stars in night sky. 

Video transitions to black screen as "Vision 2045" logo appears again.