Climate action in a changing food landscape

The world’s population is increasing towards 9 billion people in 2050. This leads to an increased demand for food causing great pressure on the world’s resources. It calls for sustainable and green solutions – and collaboration is crucial to convert challenges into opportunities.

In Denmark, the food and agricultural sector has embraced the challenges and used them to spark innovation. This has resulted in one of the most climate-efficient productions in the world. For example, Danish milk production has the lowest greenhouse-gas emission per liter of milk produced in Europe, and the second-lowest emission when it comes to beef production.

But of course, it cannot stop here! Agriculture accounts for about 11% of global greenhouse emissions and is therefore an important focus area for achieving the 2030 targets.

Ambitious goals across the value chain

The Danish government has committed to achieve a 70% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030 compared to the 1990 level and the Danish Agriculture and Food Council announced a strategy earlier this year that will make Danish food production completely climate neutral by 2050 – all the way from production to consumption.

There are several ways to reduce emissions and Denmark is a leading example on that. But to reach the ambitious goals everyone must contribute.

It is part of the Danish DNA to collaborate and work together to solve the challenges of tomorrow

The Danish food cluster is ready to deliver solutions

It is part of the Danish DNA to collaborate with partners across government, organisations, industry and academia to solve the challenges of tomorrow while making a business run. The Danish food arena thus have several initiatives to showcase in regard to green transition.

Arla Foods has for example reconverted their fossil-based plastic layer to biobased on milk cartons resulting in a 20% lower carbon footprint and at the same time set ambitious goals for a sustainable future for dairy production with their comprehensive climate ambitions of going carbon net zero by 2050.

Royal Greenland has cut their CO2 emissions by 50% by changing their packing boxes from single-use boxes to reusable cardboard “scantainers”. The estimated reuse of a single scantainer is 15-20 times. This will result in a 43% reduction in packaging use over the course of 4 years.

Danish Crown will reduce CO2 emissions from their plastic trays by 54%, by replacing the plastic material in trays to PET plastic, of which 80% of the plastic is recycled. Danish Crown have also set ambitious long-term sustainability goals, targeting a 50% reduction of the climate footprint per kilogramme of pork by 2030 and to become a completely climate-neutral value chain by 2050.

White paper on sustainability

Climate initiatives is a main focus area and throughout the Danish food value chain, you can find innovative, new solutions for a world that soon has to feed 9 billion people. Dive into the technologies, solutions and products in Food Nations white paper on Sustainability here.