On World Climate Day – December 8 - Orange Wholesale reaffirms its commitment to resilient and sustainable digital infrastructure. Faced with more frequent and intense climate events, the Group is rolling out an adaptation strategy based on anticipation, innovation and collaboration. Romain Francon, CSR Director and Chief Climate Officer at Orange Wholesale, explains how we are transforming our expertise in climate resilience into concrete solutions to support our operator and digital infrastructure provider customers.
Since 2024, we have observed a very clear trend: climate resilience has become a strategic issue for almost all our clients, digital operators and service providers. Of 16 key French and international clients, 13 have already positioned this issue as a major challenge in their regulated communications. Climate events are becoming more frequent, more intense, and less predictable, which raises expectations for telecom infrastructure.
Public authorities see digital technology as the backbone of their territories, end customers' demand uninterrupted service, and companies are questioning their ability to operate in the event of extreme events. The CSRD directive has accelerated awareness by making the assessment of exposure and vulnerability to climate risks mandatory: 36% of telecom operators now report on this in their financial statements, according to EY's 2024 Climate Action Barometer. We are at a turning point: anticipating and being resilient are now essential for network services continuity.
Our strength lies in our preparation. We have conducted a comprehensive climate assessment, covering both the short and long term, incorporating a range of scenarios from the most conservative to the most pessimistic. What sets us apart is the scale and diversity of our scope.
We have mapped the risks for around 30,000 assets, covering all of our submarine cable landing stations, satellite bases, mobile sites and infrastructure. In total, more than one million individual situations have been analyzed. Few wholesale telecom players have such a detailed view of their exposure.
Since 2025, we have been conducting an in-depth assessment to strengthen our systems: infrastructure resilience, employee protection, equipment robustness, real estate resilience, redundancy capacity, etc. All teams are contributing to this work, as it involves dynamically reassessing our resilience considering a rapidly changing climate.
We are working to ensure that climate hazards disrupt our clients' and partners' activities as little as possible. Zero risk does not exist, but we are making our networks more robust, our services more reliable, and our crisis plans more transparent.
We firmly believe that climate adaptation relies above all on innovation, organization, a culture of resilience, and Orange Wholesale already has a solid track record in this area.
Orange Wholesale operates one of the world's largest telecommunications assets: a presence in 29 countries, 45,000 km of terrestrial fiber, 450,000 km of submarine cables, 27,000 mobile sites, 7 cable and survey ships, and more than 5,000 satellite sites. This operational experience has enabled us to develop a culture of resilience that is now a major asset.
We already offer robust solutions: security plans, protected hosting, and redundant connectivity to ensure network services continuity.
The next step is our “Resilience as-a-Service” program, which aims to support our customers in understanding risk, but above all in building their climate adaptation plan.
Our ambition is to make 2026 the year of the first adaptation plans co-developed with our customers. It's a new way of working together, focused on a future where connectivity must remain reliable, no matter what.
