Kuehne+Nagel Data Chief Says Sustainability Is Now A Lever For Infrastructure Cost And Risk

For many enterprises, sustainability still lives in a spreadsheet. It shows up once a year in a report, checked off as a compliance task, and then swiftly disappears from day-to-day decision making. But that's changing. A growing group of executives now treat sustainability as a form of operational risk management, tied directly to cost, resilience, and performance at the C-suite level rather than a standalone green initiative.

The change is influenced by a new set of business realities: the surging energy and water demands of the AI boom, a geopolitical push for energy independence that is accelerating the global build-out of renewables, and the direct impact of physical climate risk. When low water levels in the Panama Canal create disruptions that ripple through global supply chains, it demonstrates how the environment has become a core economic factor. Such a pivot challenges the traditional definition of green logistics.

Niklas Sundberg sits at the intersection of technology, logistics, and sustainability. As Chief Digital Officer and Senior Vice President at leading logistics provider Kuehne+Nagel, a board member of SustainableIT.org, and author of Sustainable IT Playbook for Technology Leaders, he sees CIOs as uniquely positioned to turn sustainability from a reporting obligation into a direct driver of ROI. In practice, he argued, meaningful progress doesn't require radical reinvention or long timelines.

"Halving your footprint is not that hard. You can reduce it quite significantly with some very strategic moves," said Sundberg. The key, he explained, is starting with a clear baseline that shows where emissions and cost actually concentrate, rather than guessing or relying on high-level sustainability reports.

• Location matters: "One conscious choice can make a massive difference," Sundberg said, pointing to workload placement as a clear example. Moving a workload from a high-carbon grid like Virginia, at roughly 550 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, to a low-intensity region like Montreal, at about 20 grams, can cut emissions by twenty to twenty-five times without changing the application itself.

• Green over green: Just as important is empowering the engineers who write the code. Sundberg noted that financial incentives alone rarely change behavior. "It may not be their wallet, but it is their planet," he said, capturing why sustainability resonates more deeply with developers than cost savings ever will. Giving engineers clear visibility into the energy use and CO2 impact of their code turns sustainability into a daily design constraint, helping drive real cultural change as green software practices and measurement tools mature.

But cleaning up your own house is just phase one. Sundberg outlined a second, more strategic phase of impact, drawing a clear distinction between improving sustainability in IT and driving business value through sustainability by IT. Here, technology moves beyond an internal cost-saving tool to become a core part of the company's value proposition, as customers now demand transparency on the carbon footprint of the software they use. The strategy is built on the idea that CIOs can and should treat carbon and cost as the same operational currency. By tying the unit cost of a service to its carbon emission, sustainability can become just another metric to be optimized, embedding it directly into the P&L and elevating it beyond the abstract world of corporate social responsibility.