Maersk Group Sustainability Report 2015 Released

Activities in 2015 resulted in continued progress towards unlocking growth for the Maersk Group and for society as well as integrating sustainability in our operations, mitigating risks and improving performance levels.

The Group’s sustainability strategy focuses enabling growth through trade and education while limiting transport’s impact on climate change. Progress was made in each of these:

• Enabling trade: three projects in East Africa, Latin America and Indonesia each progressed in exploring ways to facilitate trade. The Maersk Group also joined and took a seat on the steering committee of the WTO’s Global Alliance for the Trade Facilitation Agreement.
• Energy efficiency: reducing relative Group CO2 emissions by 2% (23% since 2010), while Maersk Line (contributing more than 80% of the Group’s emissions) lowered emissions per container moved 4.5%. This brings total reductions since 2007 to 42%.
• Education: current investments in education were evaluated and a model for upgrading the skill levels of a country developed, the viability of which will be determined during 2016.

In 2015 our performance highlights in other programmes were:

• A human rights due diligence across the Group’s activities, resulting in five areas designated for further analysis in 2016-17.
• Substantial efforts to improve personal and process safety in our operations led to six out of nine businesses reducing the frequency of lost-time injuries.
• We saw seven fatalities occur in relation to our activities, the vast majority of these caused by inappropriate man-machine interaction. This is of great concern to us, and we will not rest until we have reached our stated target of zero fatalities. 
• Three oil spills above 10m3, contrary to our target of zero. We are increasing our attention on process safety even further, which we believe will aid in mitigating this risk.
• Facilitation payments in our shipping and logistics businesses reduced by 34% compared to 2014.
• Training and best practice sharing within labour relations management, and launch of a Group wide reporting tool.
• Reached our target for non-westerners in management and partly reached our targets for women in management. New targets were set for 2018,
• Instigated mandatory due diligence reviews of suppliers in our top ten high risk categories, and conducted more than 30 supplier workshops.
• Participated actively in dialogue over corporate taxation and took steps to align with new OECD requirements.

On the importance of sustainability to the Maersk Group, our CEO, Nils S. Andersen, says:

“To the Executive Board the responsibility is personal. It is our obligation to deliver our Company and our Name in better shape than when we stepped onto the bridge.”

The report is available for download at maersk.com.

For further details contact sustainability@maersk.com.