Transportation and logistics services company Crowley Maritime announced in December that it is committing to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across its business by 2050.
To reach its target, Crowley estimates that it will reduce overall emissions by 4.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases per year, or the equivalent of removing more than 900,000 cars from the road every year.
“Crowley is on a mission to become the most sustainable and innovative maritime, logistics company in the Americas,” company chairman and CEO Tom Crowley said. “Working together with our customers, suppliers, policymakers and others across our value chain, we can meet the climate crisis head on.”
As it lays the groundwork for a clean energy future, Crowley has said that it is creating partnerships across the industry with government and non-governmental organizations to collaboratively achieve decarbonization and climate action, including the Blue Sky Maritime Coalition, which focuses on the North American maritime value chain, and the World Shipping Council, which is concentrated on the global container shipping industry.
“Crowley’s value chain accounts for over 80% of our emissions across the enterprise. Collaboration with customers and partners is key to our mutual success reaching net-zero emissions using science-based standards,” Alisa Praskovich, the company’s vice president of sustainability said. “By creating mutual accountability, we will spur innovation through the open sharing of ideas.”
Reducing GHG emissions is a mission critical issue to
Crowley’s stakeholders, according to a recent materiality assessment and survey.
“First and foremost, achieving net-zero emissions is the right thing to do for our planet and deeply aligns with Crowley’s purpose. It is our responsibility as a leader to anticipate evolving stakeholder and customer expectations,” Crowley Chief Operating Officer Ray Fitzgerald said.
To achieve visibility into its total emissions footprint, Crowley has engaged cloud-based software company Salesforce to co-develop a greenhouse gas emissions monitoring and modeling platform for benchmarking, transparency and customized disclosures.
“Crowley can now have a 360 view of its carbon footprint, with automated dashboards that provide real-time, actionable insights so they can take meaningful climate action across their supply chain,” Salesforce Sustainability Cloud GM Ari Alexander explained in a statement.
Other actions taken by Crowley include introducing an all-electric tugboat and development of alternative energy vessels and offshore wind services. The company has also formed a New Energy division to provide offshore wind services in the U.S., and is developing a program that will allow customers to select more sustainable fuels.
In the coming months, the company has said, it anticipates releasing long- and short-term emission reduction goals, and is set to release an enterprise-wide sustainability roadmap and complete its inaugural sustainability report in 2022.