The Danske Bank Group has prepared a climate strategy that includes becoming carbon neutral by the end of 2009. A key element in the Group’s new climate strategy, this effort will help reduce carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, and its timing is quite fitting, as Copenhagen, the Danish capital, will host the UN Climate Summit in 2009. Danske Bank (new window, in Danish) is the first Danish bank to set a goal of reaching carbon neutrality.
Behavioural changes
The Group aims to reach carbon neutrality through various carbon-reducing activities in 2008 and afterwards. The strategy includes reducing the Group’s own direct emissions from offices and transport through behavioural changes, for example reduced travel, increased use of eMeetings and purchases of more energy-efficient IT equipment.
These measures will be launched in February 2008 in an employee campaign that will call attention to the relation between resource consumption and carbon emissions. The objective of the campaign is to change the staff’s behaviour and thus save on both energy and costs.
Carbon credits
To support these activities, in the beginning of 2008 the Group will hire an energy consultant who will identify possible savings in the Group’s operations. The carbon dioxide emissions that cannot be eliminated will be offset by the purchase of carbon credits from validated carbon-reduction projects. The credits will be purchased from projects in which Danske Bank, in return for its investment in renewable energy or biogas production plants, for example, can deduct the reduction in greenhouse gasses from its own carbon account. The credits will thus represent a tangible reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
“We have just begun investigating specific options for purchasing credits and have not yet made a commitment to any particular projects,” says Anne Søgaard Melchiorsen, Group CSR Manager.
“But one project might involve using methane gas from eastern European waste disposal facilities in biogas plants, for example. At such plants, methane gas from waste is burned and converted to carbon dioxide, which is much less harmful to the environment, reducing the effect on the climate by 96 per cent.”
Low-carbon products
Besides the goal of carbon neutrality, the new climate strategy also focuses on how the Group can contribute to a solution to the climate-change problem by providing financial infrastructure that supports innovation and by developing new financial products that support a conversion to a low-carbon economy.
Published on December 5, 2007