Climate Change Agreement: a new record
In the United Kingdom, the Cold Chain Federation (CCF), is starting to reap the benefits of its Climate Change Agreement (CCA), a scheme designed to combat energy consumption associated with the cold chain, which is already bringing some very encouraging results.
This is reflected by the fact that the British Environmental Agency has demonstrated how its project has already been successful in significantly reducing emissions from refrigeration chambers, while participating companies involved seen their energy efficiency increase by up to 19%.
What the Climate Change Agreement involves
The Climate Change Agreement consists of a voluntary system, developed by the Cold Chain Federation, which any company operating in the refrigeration sector can sign up to.
Its aim is to incentivise participants to develop sustainable production methods, by introducing latest generation systems and equipment. Those converting to this system can benefit from tax breaks offered by the British government as part of its drive towards independence from fossil fuels.
This initiative was launched in 2013 in order to increase by at least 11.7 percentage points the energy efficiency of companies operating in the cold chain sector. However, the government has discovered that between 2008 and 2020, participating companies managed to achieve increases of as much as 19.2%.
This exceptional result (read more in this article from Coolingspot), is due to the huge effort made by all the companies involved, who have worked solidly, investing in the purchase of modern equipment and developing increasingly environmentally-friendly production processes.
An important step towards decarbonisation
The staggering number of companies registered with the Climate Change Agreement means that the chances of achieving industrial decarbonisation are good; it is a long arduous journey which will only be concluded when carbon neutrality is finally reached.
According to representatives of the Cold Chain Federation, high efficiency refrigeration chambers developed in the United Kingdom, along with the achievement of carbon neutrality, as mentioned above, are the aspects which will play the most decisive role in the fight against climate change.
As highlighted by the Environmental Agency, the CCA has enabled an overall reduction in emissions of 6.6 MtCO2e in the two-year period 2019-2020. This is the equivalent of a 13.3% decrease, obtained thanks to the 8,705 companies who have signed up to the scheme so far. (An overall decrease in emissions of 23.8 MtCO2e was recorded between 2013 and 2020.)
These results have increased the value of companies participating in the Climate Change Agreement by over ten million pounds sterling per year. Furthermore, these same companies have been able to reduce the amount of tax payable for the Climate Change Levy, as well as their production costs, thanks to the superior efficiency of the equipment they have introduced.
As a consequence of this success and the high number of companies who are signing up to this project, the British Government has decided to further expand the tax benefits available to those joining the scheme.
The United Kingdom’s strategy on incentivising the fight against climate change would seem to be a winner. There is of course still plenty of work to do, but this approach could be the right one. It is to be hoped that other nations will follow the example of the British and invest in high energy refrigeration chambers.
Translated by Joanne Beckwith
