Climate action on board | ClimatePartner

Oliver Heer Ocean Racing and ClimatePartner give the go-ahead for a carbon neutral sailing campaign. The goal is to participate in the Vendée Globe 2024, the world’s toughest sailing regatta.

Over the next three years, the Oliver Heer Ocean Racing team will work closely together with ClimatePartner to make its participation in the Vendée Globe 2024 carbon neutral, including the preparations, qualification, and even the race itself. The skipper of the sailing team is 34-year-old Oliver Heer, who already has a lot of offshore sailing experience for his age.

The Vendée Globe is a 44,000 kilometre sailing race that goes around the globe and takes place every four years. According to the rules of the IMOCA boat class, the race must be completed without stopping ashore and the entire regatta must be sailed single-handedly. The Vendée Globe is therefore considered the toughest sailing race in the world.

The long-term partnership has been in place since spring 2022 and is to last at least until the end of the competition in early 2025. Both ClimatePartner and the Oliver Heer Ocean Racing team share the same values. For the sailing crew, wind-powered sailing is inextricably linked to climate action, while ClimatePartner paves the way to carbon neutrality with its cloud-based software and individual consulting. The focus of the cooperation is the annual calculation of the corporate carbon footprint, the reduction of CO₂ emissions, and the offset of unabated emissions by supporting an internationally certified carbon offset project.

"We are very excited to be part of this fantastic adventure! Oliver Heer and his ocean racing crew are a unique company and our first sailing crew to work with. Oliver and his team are putting tremendous effort in keeping their carbon footprint as low as possible. We are proud to enable the team to successfully sail a carbon neutral Vendée Globe in 2024."
Tristan A. Foerster, CEO and Co-Founder of ClimatePartner

The calculation includes direct emissions, for example from the company's own facilities and vehicles, as well as indirect emissions from sources like purchased energy, business trips, employee travel, and purchased goods and services. With the help of the calculation, the areas where emissions occur are highlighted and hotspots can be identified. This is the basis for the crew's reduction strategy and specific measures to reduce the carbon footprint.

Since Oliver and his team rely on wind power for their sport, they decided to support a wind energy project in De Aar, South Africa, and use it to offset unabated emissions. With the help of 96 wind turbines, an average of 439,600 MWh of electricity per year has been generated there since 2017 and fed into the South African grid instead of fossil fuels.

The boat itself is also used as a floating research and development lab. This means that sustainable technologies are developed, tested, and promoted on board the IMOCA. With the help of the Swiss Polar Institute, the team is already collecting scientific data at remote, little-explored locations in the world's oceans. This data is constantly being analysed and will later be made publicly available. The measurements usually include parameters such as temperature, salinity, or the CO₂ concentration of the seawater and the atmosphere. The evaluation of the data should contribute to a better understanding of climate change.

"Our planet does not belong to us, we belong to our planet. We recognise our responsibility in addressing climate change."
Oliver Heer, Skipper of Oliver Heer Ocean Racing

Even before the start of the Vendée Globe in 2024, there will be lots happening, because there are still a few shorter qualifying races to get through. In November 2022, Oliver took part in the 3,542-nautical-mile Route du Rhum race, which also only takes place every four years. The race starts from Saint-Malo in Brittany, France, and move across the Atlantic to the finish line near Pointe-à Pitre, Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. During the journey, Oliver began collecting his first environmental data.