IHS Towers, one of the largest independent owners, operators and developers of shared communications infrastructure in the world by tower count, has announced what it calls its Carbon Reduction Roadmap, with an emphasis on its African markets in particular.

The Carbon Reduction Roadmap, says IHS, provides a comprehensive strategy for decreasing IHS Towers’ emissions, including a goal to reduce the Scope 1 and Scope 2 kilowatt-hour emissions intensity of its tower portfolio by 50% by 2030, using 2021 emissions data as the baseline.

According to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a global standard framework for measuring and managing greenhouse gas emissions, Scope 1 emissions include direct emissions from a company’s owned or controlled sources. Scope 2 emissions include indirect greenhouse gas emissions from purchased or acquired energy.

Under Project Green, the next significant step of its Carbon Reduction Roadmap, IHS expects to spend $214 million in capex towards these efforts between 2022 and 2024, and to deliver annual recurring levered free cash flow (RLFCF) savings of $77 million in 2025. This, in turn, is expected to generate an implied return on investment of 30%.

Savings will be achieved by connecting more sites to the electricity grid and via the deployment and integration of battery storage and solar panel solutions.

In scope for Project Green are IHS Towers’ African operations in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda and Zambia, along with Kuwait; all of these markets have traditionally had a strong reliance on diesel generators.

IHS Towers says it has also taken this opportunity to revise its corporate values and incorporate a sustainability value that focuses on health and safety, security, and the environment, to ensure that these topics are further embedded throughout the business. “These values,” it says, “are our guiding principles that help foster teamwork and ensure we achieve our shared business goals.”

The Carbon Reduction Roadmap is available to download via the IHS Towers website.