Sustainable production

On 9 August, the latest edition of the UN climate panel's report was published. Among other things, temperatures are rising far too quickly. It is absolutely our fault, and there is more laughing gas in the atmosphere than there has been in approx. 1 million year - the report is seriously not cheerful reading.

We are of course well aware that Tracelink cannot make a world of difference on that point, but we would like to help push a little in the right direction by giving our customers ongoing insight into how sustainable their production is.

Trees drying out due to rising temperatures

As a starting point, you cannot improve your production blindly; you need landmarks. We think we can help with that!

Our idea is that by analyzing the data that our customers register in Tracelink, information can be generated that the company can use to assess whether it is on the right track in relation to climate-friendly production. A banal example could perhaps be to compare the company's number of kilometers driven with revenue; if you can maintain turnover and reduce the number of kilometres, all other things being equal, the development is going in the right direction. This is information that many companies have already registered in Tracelink.

Climate accounts

We have therefore, together with a handful of our customers, initiated a project around sustainability and climate accounts. We will simply investigate whether companies can use Tracelink to collect data for calculating KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that are important in relation to climate targets. This may be data that already exists in Tracelink, but there may also be a need to collect new data.

Preparing climate accounts can be very complex, so we have therefore allied ourselves with Kresten Bjerre from Bæredygtig Rådgivning and partner in The sustainability consultants. Kresten helps companies on their way to sustainable development, carries out climate checks and helps draw up climate action plans with realistic targets. He will be the rope holder in our project and be the link between the identification of the companies' need for action and Tracelink's opportunities to uncover the status and trends of the companies' production.

Kresten will focus on the company's climate footprint. That is how much CO2 the company emits and how this emission can be reduced. There is a CO2 tax on the way, and therefore it is very important that you can document how much you emit.

Workshops

Initially, we will hold some online workshops, where we will identify the various participating companies' needs for action plans and the possibility of collecting the relevant data, which together with finances, e.g. reflects:

Energy consumption in production (e.g. light, heat, ventilation)
Transport (e.g. company cars, freight, travel)
Materials (eg waste, sustainable extraction)

On this basis, we will develop new sections for Tracelink's control panel, so that you can easily see if things are going in the right direction.

At Tracelink, we think that the project is relevant for all our customers - regardless of whether you feel responsible for climate change or simply want to minimize the effect of the coming years' sharply increasing CO2 taxes as an expression of banal healthy business. Contact us if you would like to participate in the project.

August 2021

The most important main messages of the UN report

It is unequivocal that human influence has caused warming in the atmosphere, oceans and land. There have been widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere and biosphere.

Each of the last four decades has been progressively warmer than any previous decade since 1850. The global surface temperature was 1.09 °C higher in 2011-2020 than in 1850-1900.

In 2019, the atmospheric content of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide was higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years, and the current CO2 concentration has not been experienced for at least 2 million years.

The global surface temperature will continue to rise until at least the middle of the century iall the discharge scenarios. Global warming will exceed 1.5°C and 2°C during the 21st century unless there are major reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades.

With any increase in global warming, the changes in extremes will continue to increase. There will be an increased occurrence of unprecedented extreme weather events in line with global warming, even if it is limited to 1.5°C. The expected changes in frequency are greater for more extreme weather events.

Many of the changes caused by greenhouse gas emissions up to today and in the future are irreversible for centuries, up to millennia. This particularly applies to changes in the oceans, the ice caps and the global sea level.

The frequency of extreme water level events will increase in the 21st century, so that a storm surge, which today statistically occurs every 100 years, will be expected every year by the end of this century in over half of the places where water levels are observed .

There are consequences of global warming that have a low probability of happening, but which cannot be omitted in a risk assessment. For example, account should be taken of the collapse of the ice caps at the poles, sudden changes in ocean circulation, certain coincident weather extremes and a much greater warming than expected.

If man-made global warming is to be limited to a certain level, it requires that the accumulated CO2 emissions be limited, that a net CO2 emission of zero be achieved at the same time as significant reductions in the emission of other greenhouse gases.