Sustainability at A.P. Moller - Maersk
A comprehensive ESG strategy with a commitment to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions across our business by 2040.
Maersk customer solutions
Sustainability is a central topic in our customer engagements.
By fully understanding our customers’ needs, we are better positioned to develop and deliver impactful solutions and services that drive their business outcomes. Sustaining close partnerships with our customers helps us anticipate their priorities and strategic directions, ensuring that our offerings evolve in step with their challenges and needs so we can advance together towards net zero – as fast as possible.
About 60% of our top and strategic customers have committed to, or set, science-based targets aligned with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), highlighting their need to increasingly decarbonise their scope 3 (supply chain) emissions, in addition to scopes 1 and 2. Helping them maintain visibility over their greenhouse gas (GHG) emission footprint from logistics, and providing concrete solutions to achieve reductions, are two of our key climate priorities.
Our customers show differing ambitions and maturity stages in terms of decarbonisation, strongly influenced by dependencies such as regulation and price sensitivity. Therefore, Maersk continues to adapt its portfolio to flexibly meet customer needs.
Co-innovating with our customers
We continuously partner with our customers worldwide to innovate and optimise industry leading low emission logistics solutions that deliver on their decarbonisation goals and support their business objectives.
All of our customers can benefit from a reliable partner, with ambitious sustainability targets, and concrete actions that ensure we meet or go beyond our customers’ and the industry’s sustainability standards. We see the Increasing trend towards the strategic importance of ESG and sustainability mirrored in the growing maturity of the sustainability commitments made by our customers, evolving from a baseline focus on managing the risks of poor performance in supply chains to more ambitious strategies and investments. This is driving a shift from transactional procurement of reduced emission solutions* to more long-term, strategic partnering that contributes to industry-level decarbonisation and transformation.
Through multi-stakeholder forums, such as the Smart Freight Centre, the First Movers Coalition and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, we collaborate with our customers to improve industry standards, share best practice examples, and develop concepts on how to scale reduced emission solutions for the benefit of our businesses, society and our planet.
Customer dialogues in 2024 spanned several topics of interest for future collaborations, including regulatory engagements, circularity, simplifying the complexity of decarbonisation data visibility and comparability, challenges to the execution of decarbonisation strategies and the overall resilience of supply chains.
* Maersk defines 'reduced emission solutions' as products running on fuels with at least 65% reductions in GHG emissions on a lifecycle basis compared to fossil fuels of 94 g CO2e/MJ.
Decarbonising logistics
In line with our customers’ ambitions to fight climate change, we support our customers in setting and achieving ambitious decarbonisation targets for their logistics operations.
We offer visibility across our customers’ greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions footprint from logistics, to understand the status quo of their decarbonisation journeys. This acts as a foundation to strategically decide how to achieve actual emission reductions.
Maersk invests and partners with several stakeholders (such as customers, suppliers, industry organisations), to develop reduced emission solutions for end-to-end logistics. Already today, we offer reduced emission logistics solutions across ocean, landside and air transportation, and additional solutions are currently being piloted to decarbonise rail and barge transportation.
2024 saw the arrival of seven new, large capacity (16,000-17,000 TEU) methanol-capable container vessels to support customer climate ambitions, as well as the launch of the Maersk Halifax – the world’s first container vessel retrofitted for a dual-fuel, methanol-capable engine. Maersk has an additional 11 large container vessels arriving in 2025, as well as 6 additional 9,000 TEU capacity vessels arriving in 2026-2027.
In landside logistics, we have already started EV powered truck operations in the US, Germany, Spain, Thailand and China, with several pilots in other countries under development.
Sustainability engagements beyond decarbonisation
Maersk can make the greatest contribution to our customers’ sustainability goals through our low emission solutions – but sustainability goes beyond decarbonisation impacts. That’s why we work with our customers to support responsible business practices across all relevant sustainability areas. In 2024, Maersk continued its collaboration with customers beyond decarbonisation, on social issues that reflect our shared values. This Included working together to analyse risks and opportunities for positive impact - e.g. with customers who wish to understand diversity in their supply chains. It also includes collaboration around human rights, contributing to more inclusive and responsible global trade.
Read more in our Annual Report.
Strategic advisory and sustainability partnerships
We support our customers’ compliance with industry standards of sustainable logistics by advising them on impactful strategies to reduce their GHG emissions, and other responsible business practices.
At the highest level of collaboration, we partner with our customers to co-innovate and pilot reduced emission solutions. We know that no one can achieve their decarbonisation commitments alone, and cooperation across industries is essential when decarbonising customers’ supply chains. In particular, the six 2024 name giving events for our new dual-fuel methanol capable vessels represented important opportunities to engage and pilot reduced emission solutions with our customers while celebrating mutual progress on decarbonisation.
Emissions Dashboard
How can businesses understand their GHG emission footprint and plan better to lower it? The first step is certainly visibility. The second is a good strategy of clear actions.
Maersk’s Emissions Dashboard consolidates emissions data across all carriers and transport modes in one place to help our customers plan how to decarbonise their supply chain. This solution allows greater visibility and clearer reporting on progress made within climate ambitions, while also providing the baseline to optimise a company’s supply chain all in one place.
Maersk ECO Delivery
ECO Delivery is Maersk’s product family for reduced emission transportation. Maersk ECO Delivery Ocean, ECO Delivery Inland and ECO Delivery Air help customers reduce GHG emissions from ocean shipping, inland transport and air freight, respectively.
In 2024, around 3% of our customer’s cargo was transported on our ECO Delivery Ocean Product – and customers across many industries including automotive, food & beverage, fashion and pharmaceuticals are now moving 100% of their Maersk ocean volumes with ECO Delivery Ocean. In 2024, additional countries were added under the ECO Delivery Inland product, allowing the usage of battery electric vehicles in additional geographical areas. Also, Maersk’s ECO Delivery Air product was further scaled together with customers and commercial airline partners.
Annual Report 2024
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