Nokia announced its Sustainable Finance Framework that places sustainability as core to future stakeholder value and central to its business outcomes. The framework reinforces Nokia’s commitment to sustainable growth by ensuring its financing strategy supports the company’s recently enhanced ESG strategy.

Nokia’s ESG strategy emphasises that purpose and profit go hand in hand.

The ESG strategy is built around five pillars where the company can have a significant material impact. Nokia believes linking the ESG strategy to the Sustainable Finance Framework allows it to embed sustainability throughout the organisation while creating long-term value for stakeholders, both internal and external.

Nokia understands its responsibility to decouple the continuous growth in data traffic from equivalent growth in energy consumption and to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across the value chain, from its own operations to the supply chain and customers.

 Among Nokia’s central ESG objectives is its commitment to reduce its GHG emissions by 50% between 2019 and 2030 across its value chain. 

This target has been accepted by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and is aligned with the 1.5°C global warming scenario. This has been selected to be the Sustainability Performance Target in Nokia’s Sustainable Finance Framework that enables the issuance of sustainability-linked financing instruments. 

Focusing on this single objective helps Nokia to systematically track its GHG emissions reduction across Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.

Second-party opinion for the Framework has been provided by Sustainalytics, assessing Nokia’s Sustainability Performance Target as “Highly Ambitious” and the company’s selected Key Performance Indicator, reduction of absolute GHG emissions across its value chain to be “Very Strong”.

Marco Wirén, chief financial officer of Nokia, said, “Complementing our enhanced ESG strategy with the Framework is a logical next step in our progress to strengthen the connection between our ESG and financing strategies. 

We linked the margin of our €1.5 billion revolving credit facility to our sustainability targets already in 2019 and signed our first sustainability-linked guarantee facility in 2022. As we accelerate our growth, we remain deeply committed to be part of the solution to the world’s biggest challenges.”

Melissa Schoeb, chief corporate affairs officer of Nokia, said, “Sustainability is core to Nokia’s purpose of creating technology that helps the world act together. We’re delighted that Sustainalytics’ opinion aligns with our view regarding the strength of our Framework and that our target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across our value chain was assessed as highly ambitious.”