ESG - Environmental, Social & Governance

Sustainability and Responsible Business Operations

At NH Towage A/S, we have carried out towage operations at sea for almost five decades. From our base on Frederiksø in Svendborg, we operate in Danish and international waters, and our entire fleet sails under the Danish flag.

Our work is rooted in practical experience, good seamanship and the values that have guided us throughout the years: responsibility, loyalty, respect, honesty and flexibility. They serve as the compass we navigate by, both at sea and on shore.

In 2024, we published our first consolidated ESG Report. Since then, we have continued to build on our work to collect data, document our impacts and create greater transparency around the way we operate our business.

Our ESG reporting provides an open insight into the engine room of NH Towage A/S. Not only into the results we are proud of, but also into our most significant impacts, our development from year to year, and the areas where our data foundation and practices can continue to improve.

Why do we report?

We believe in transparency. Both because it represents good practice and because we operate in a highly regulated and safety-critical maritime environment where trust and documentation go hand in hand.

Experience and good seamanship are essential in our industry, but they stand stronger when supported by data. ESG reporting provides us with a common foundation for understanding our impacts, following developments over time and making more informed decisions.

Our reporting is based on the voluntary VSME standard and is supplemented by operational and sustainability key figures that are relevant to our business and the reality in which our vessels operate.

Our focus areas

Environment

Our most significant environmental impact lies where most of our work also takes place: across our fleet.

Fuel consumption from our vessels is by far the largest source of our greenhouse gas emissions. We therefore closely monitor our energy and fuel consumption and work to understand the relationship between activity, operations and emissions.

We work to reduce our environmental impact where technically and operationally feasible. At the same time, we follow the maritime regulations and procedures designed to prevent pollution and protect the marine environment wherever we operate.

Our environmental reporting also covers areas including energy, water, waste, resource use and biodiversity. As our data foundation improves, we gain a more comprehensive picture of our impact and a stronger basis for following developments over time.

Social matters

Our employees are the crew that make every operation possible.

Safety and collaboration are therefore two of the strongest moorings in our company culture. In an industry characterised by complex maritime operations, competence, training and decent working conditions have a very tangible meaning, both for the individual on board and for ensuring that an operation can be carried out safely.

We also play a role in educating the maritime workforce of the future. On board our vessels, maritime trainees and apprentices are given the opportunity to gain practical training and accumulate the required sea service needed to complete their education.

It is a responsibility we take seriously, because good seamanship is not carried forward by vessels and equipment alone, but by people and the competencies passed on to the next generation.

Business conduct

We take responsibility from the bridge.

Our business conduct is founded on integrity, responsible conduct and respect for the regulations and international maritime conventions governing our operations.

As our ESG work has become more formalised, we have also strengthened the documented foundation for our responsible business operations. Our Code of Conduct and our Human Rights Policy and IT Security Policy set out our principles and expectations regarding, among other things, conduct, employee rights, information security and compliance.

Our whistleblower scheme and maritime grievance procedures also provide employees and other relevant stakeholders with channels for raising concerns about serious matters.

Latest insight from the engine room: ESG Report 2025

2025 marks our second year of consolidated ESG reporting.

While the 2024 report provided our first consolidated picture, the 2025 report builds on this with a more comprehensive data foundation and greater opportunities to understand what lies behind the overall figures.

In 2025, our reporting was expanded to include waste and water data from the fleet, as well as more detailed information on tonnage, activity and operating hours. At the same time, our fleet was expanded with NH Worker and NH Tender, which are included in the reporting for the documented part of the year.

Environment in 2025

Our Scope 1 emissions amounted to 4,071.4 tCO₂e, while our location-based Scope 2 emissions amounted to 12.3 tCO₂e.

By comparison, Scope 1 emissions amounted to 3,354.7 tCO₂e and Scope 2 emissions to 7.5 tCO₂e in 2024.

The figures do not tell the whole story on their own. The activity and composition of our fleet change from year to year, and in 2025 we therefore also introduced supplementary operational key figures that make it possible to follow emissions in relation to, among other things, active operating hours.

Time Charter continues to be reported separately as a supplementary key figure and does not constitute a full Scope 3 inventory.

An honest look into the engine room also means reporting the incidents that did not go as intended. The 2025 ESG Report therefore includes the environmental incident registered during the year, together with the subsequent response and follow-up.

People and maritime competencies in 2025

In 2025, we registered 4,946.6 training hours among our employees.

At the same time, the year’s data foundation included 32 maritime trainees and apprentices, who together accounted for 31,105 registered hours.

These are two different key figures, but they tell us something about the same reality: that competence, training and development are an important part of operating a safe and responsible maritime business.

A stronger foundation for responsible operations

In 2025, our Code of Conduct, Human Rights Policy and IT Security Policy, together with our internal IT Guidelines, were approved by the Board of Directors.

This means that several of the values and practices that have already formed part of the way we operate our business have now been more clearly formalised.

The 2025 ESG Report also includes an Independent Auditor’s Limited Assurance Report on the reported ESG data, as part of our efforts to strengthen our ESG reporting and data foundation.

Our way forward

We build on almost five decades of experience from ports, coastlines and open waters. Our ESG work does not change that foundation, but it gives us more instruments to navigate by.

We therefore continue, knot by knot, to strengthen our data foundation, documentation and understanding of our impacts.

For us, responsible reporting is not about being able to demonstrate improvements across every key figure every year. It is also about being able to explain why the figures develop as they do, being transparent about the limitations of our data, and improving the foundation from year to year.

In this way, ESG reporting is not an end in itself, but a tool that helps us stay on course, ask better questions about our own operations and create transparency for customers, employees and business partners.

Read our ESG Reports

If you would like to take a closer look inside the engine room, you can read our full ESG Reports here.

The reports contain our key figures, methodologies, boundaries and descriptions of developments for each reporting year.