Safe Life: from scattered electricity bills to a full climate baseline across 40+ companies in less than a year

At the start of 2025, Safe Life's entire climate dataset amounted to little more than its electricity bills. Now they have an emission reduction roadmap, their first climate accounting report and a running start. The Stockholm-headquartered group distributes life-saving medical equipment, including defibrillators, along with training on how to use them, for customers across Europe and North America. Through rapid acquisition, it had grown into a portfolio of more than 40 companies with close to 900 employees. Facing an owner-mandated goal to establish a complete climate baseline, group-wide targets, and a reduction plan by August 2026, the team jumped into action, and as the deadline arrives, that goal has been successfully achieved!

The Initial Challenge

Initially, the challenge was two-fold: it was a whole new way of working and they had a wide scope to deal with. More than 40 subsidiaries, at different levels of maturity, all needed to report activity data on the same timeline. Some already had finance teams that could turn a request around in a day, others had never been asked to track anything beyond their own utility bills. Challenges and worries amounted to the amount of work this would entail, and how time consuming it would be. We now recognize that processes require an equal amount of time at the outset as platform fine-tuning, since this is where many of the challenges lie.

"The biggest issue, honestly, was on our own side: finding the right people to report. Not a product problem, more an internal one. It's always a question of who the actual data owners are, and that changes fast when you're adding companies all the time." — Anton Kramar, Head of Group Business Control, Safe Life

How Safe Life got their running start

Together with consultants from SustainLab's partner Differ, and SustainLab's Customer Success team, the process decisions were then made early on: don't ask every subsidiary for the same level of detail. Segment the group by where accurate data was actually likely to exist, the same way a finance team spends most of its attention on the handful of entities that account for most of the numbers, and let the rest report at whatever level they honestly could.

Differ led the climate strategy: setting the scope, running the emissions calculations, and building the targets and reduction plan. SustainLab owned the data collection itself: segmenting the group so a two-person subsidiary wasn't asked for the same level of detail as a 200-person one, building and sending the actual data requests to every subsidiary, and chasing down gaps as they came in rather than waiting until year-end to find them. Every one of the 40+ subsidiaries ended up reporting, and where the numbers still had gaps, SustainLab built out custom emission-factor extrapolations, a data quality framework, and the dashboards Safe Life uses to track it all, work that ran in parallel with Differ's modelling.

Once the baseline was in, that decision paid off in a way the team hadn't fully expected. The problem that had looked group-wide turned out to be much smaller.

"It's actually only five or six companies we need to address, not all of our entities. Instead of talking to all fifty companies about doing something, we can focus our effort where it counts." — Andreas Wigzell, CFO, Safe Life

What Happened Next

The first sign that the approach was working came quietly: every subsidiary asked to report, did. That almost never happens on a first attempt, and it held because they were asked to report data they actually had. By the time the numbers were in, close to 80% of the group's revenue was represented by measured data rather than estimates, well above what a first reporting cycle usually manages. And the internal workload that had worried the team so much at the start turned out to be lighter than feared.

"It's been up and down, but honestly, less than I thought it would be." — Anton Kramar, Head of Group Business Control, Safe Life

Then came the moment that made the whole exercise feel worth it. Partway through the project, a tender request landed from a US customer, asking for exactly the kind of emissions data Safe Life had just started collecting.

"We had a big tender in the US asking for exactly this kind of data, and we could say: actually, since yesterday, we have that." — Andreas Wigzell, CFO, Safe Life

It didn't stop there. Once Safe Life started asking its own suppliers for emissions data, some suppliers came back with something new: a named person now responsible for sustainability, where before there had been no one at all.

"Nobody had asked these suppliers these questions before. In a way, we're pushing the whole industry forward on this, which is also a good commercial argument." — Andreas Wigzell, CFO, Safe Life

Looking Back

Asked what he'd tell someone starting the same journey eight months ago, Andreas comes back to two things: a clear goal, and the discipline to leave things out.

"Have a clear goal, and know exactly what you want out of it. It helped enormously that we had a firm deadline from above, that's what gets you moving instead of drifting. And don't try to do everything at once. Know what's actually material, and don't be afraid to leave out what doesn't matter." — Andreas Wigzell, CFO, Safe Life

Part of that discipline was agreeing early that the target didn't need to be a full Science Based Targets commitment on day one, just a credible stepping stone toward one. That single decision gave Differ room to build a pragmatic plan instead of an overambitious one, and it shows in how the reduction plan reads today: ambitious, but not implausible.

Looking Ahead

Safe Life is now folding supplier data quality into its regular quarterly reviews, working toward a dashboard that shows each supplier's actual numbers against what's still extrapolated. On the compliance side, the group already has a double materiality assessment done and expects CSRD-aligned reporting requirements within the next couple of years. Having the GHG accounting already in place means the heaviest part of that future work is behind them, not ahead.

"We feel comfortable presenting this to the board. It's a big reduction, but it doesn't feel unreasonable, it feels doable." — Andreas Wigzell, CFO, Safe Life

We at SustainLab are excited to continue partnering with Safe Life on their journey and their development within sustainability as they take the leadership position within their industry.