Climate and nature
We are committed to the most ambitious pathway of the Paris Agreement and to reducing emissions from our own operations and our value chain. And to go beyond our value chain to reduce and remove the equivalent of our historical emissions from operations from the year of our founding in 1941.
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Reducing emissions from our operations
We are working to improve biodiversity on our own sites and to take a more systematic approach to address the impacts in our supply chain. By 2030 we aim to reduce our emissions from production and operations by 100%. To achieve this, we are transitioning to 100% renewable energy and focusing on energy efficiency across all sites. In 2022, we signed two new Renewable Virtual Power Purchase Agreements and commissioned two new solar parks in southern Spain. Once both of these are operational in 2025, they will produce 167GWh of renewable energy annually. This is enough additional power to cover all VELUX Group European operations and up to 90% of our global electricity consumption.Decarbonising our products
We are continually working towards reducing the embodied carbon footprint of our products. This includes the carbon emissions associated with raw materials, transport to VELUX and manufacturing. Our procurement and product development teams are focused on sourcing low carbon and high recycled content materials wherever possible. Through partnerships and collaborations with suppliers, including ArcelorMittal, Hydro and Novelis, we are working to reduce carbon emissions from the steel and aluminium used in our products. At the same time, we are designing new products to optimise material use.
From roof windows to communities of the future
As part of an industry that accounts for a third of the global CO2 emissions, we are taking responsibility for finding ways to build more sustainably. The Build for Life project and Living Places concept shows how rethinking buildings can help solve some of the global climate and health challenges we currently face.
Our historical emissions
We finance forest projects that reduce and remove carbon equivalent to our historical CO2 emissions. The projects are designed and delivered by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Our twenty-year partnership will deliver a portfolio of forest projects in tropical forest landscapes with high biodiversity value that will create positive change for people, nature and climate. The partnership’s goal is to donate the verified carbon reductions and removals generated by the forest projects to the host countries’ climate commitments under the Paris Agreement. This means that the verified carbon from the forest projects will not be used for off-setting of VELUX carbon emissions or any other organisation’s emissions.
Safeguarding biodiversity
Biodiversity is essential for the processes that support all life on earth. We rely on nature for our raw materials. We aim to support biodiversity through efforts on three levels. Although our own operations have a limited impact on biodiversity at a global scale, we will work to get our own house in order while asking the same of others. Our greatest impacts and dependencies on nature are in our supply chain. We will assess these impacts and take the first steps to reduce negative impacts on biodiversity and to protect and restore nature. We have started to scope the work to support biodiversity at our own sites and in our supply chain. We also work to improve biodiversity beyond our value chain through our partnership with WWF.