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.

Executing this strategy often requires leaders to first address the data silo problem. Sundberg reframed the issue, explaining that what often appears to be a nebulous governance problem is, for a CIO, a concrete data architecture challenge. He said that building a "data mesh" to create a "digital product passport" for components helps provide the visibility needed for both sustainability initiatives and mandatory compliance with international child labor laws and carbon tariffs like the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

• Becoming sust-AI-nable: When it comes to AI, Sundberg sees two sides of the same coin: while it can help model the path to net-zero, he stressed that the industry has a responsibility to build it more sustainably. "At the moment, it's more of a race towards building out the most powerful next-generation GPT rather than also taking care of being sustainable," he said, noting that in this race, many are happy to turn a blind eye to the environmental impact.

He offered an example from the logistics sector, where digital twins are used to solve these real-world operational challenges. Logistics firms can now emulate a customer’s supply chain as a digital twin, allowing them to simulate future scenarios and optimize for multiple variables simultaneously—balancing the most cost-efficient trade lane and quality of service with CO2 emissions and sustainability targets. Even when products must be airlifted, this approach allows for dynamic compensation with levers like sustainable aviation fuel.

• Weeks to seconds: Looking forward, Sundberg noted that while the AI boom is creating environmental pressures, the technology itself is already delivering major efficiency gains. These advances make the optimizations required for sustainability more feasible than ever, creating a new blueprint for how CIOs can combat climate change. "We had OCR scanning that was maybe 70% accurate and took two weeks to set up for a document type," Sundberg explained. "Now, new AI models can translate that document into any format in seconds, at one-hundredth of the cost."

Ultimately, Sundberg connected the environmental unsustainability of the current AI boom with its questionable economic foundation. He noted that today’s low AI prices are a temporary market-share tactic that does not reflect the technology's true cost and will inevitably rise.

"I think there will be a correction for the tech companies. It’s unsustainable that a company like OpenAI is losing billions with only 5% paying customers. That business model is not sustainable. Just as we saw with SaaS, prices will go up once companies have created that stickiness. AI has never been as cheap as it is today, and it certainly won't remain that way," he concluded.