Climate protection at SBB – all good things come in threes.

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Through its climate protection programme, SBB is actively committed to reducing CO₂ emissions and countering climate-influenced natural hazards.

The programme involves a three-pronged approach: providing climate-friendly mobility, reducing our own emissions from operations and securing our infrastructure against the effects of climate change in the long term.

The broad scientific consensus is that unless significant preventive action is taken in the near future, we will be unable to limit the increase in temperature at the earth's surface to 2°C. If sufficient measures are not taken, we can expect changes to our climate by the middle of this century that will have a huge economic, social and ecological impact across the globe.

The UN climate summit in Copenhagen, at which a succession agreement to the Kyoto Protocol is due to be signed, is thus an acid test of the international community's will to stem climate change.

SBB is meeting these challenges by pursuing a threefold climate protection strategy. By 2020, we have set ourselves the goal of reducing our CO₂ emissions from operations by 30% compared with 1990. This includes planned measures to reduce fuel consumption in buildings which will save around 14,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions annually.

However, it is at least as important for SBB to provide a range of services that ensures freight and passengers can be moved around in a way that damages the climate as little as possible. Our biggest challenge is therefore to ensure that as large a proportion of the continuously growing demand for mobility as possible is catered for by rail services, thereby contributing to climate protection.

Finally, we have already introduced forward-thinking measures to ensure that the network will continue to function securely even if the consequences of climate change start to be felt through extreme weather conditions in Switzerland.