Can you talk about you or your company’s efforts relating to renewability, sustainability or other environmentally- friendly activities?

SAP aspires to a world with zero emissions, zero waste, and zero inequality. Our corporate sustainability approach is to create positive economic, social, and environmental impact within planetary boundaries – with a special focus on holistic steering and ESG reporting, climate action, circular economy, and social responsibility. SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises, our comprehensive cloud-based sustainability solutions enable our global customers to manage their carbon footprint, reduce material waste, and become a socially responsible business. We collaborate with our global partner ecosystem combining their deep industry expertise and customer insights with our leading sustainability technology portfolio. The resulting ESG transparency helps companies reinvent their business models and deliver the sustainable outcomes the world urgently needs.

Why are sustainability officers well-placed to drive change in the business world?

Sustainability leaders have an extremely important role to play in pushing their organizations to accelerate their pace of action on their sustainability commitments. They need to continuously learn from the ever-changing regulatory landscape and bring that learning in the company, through strategic influencing, collaboratively networking across functions. Starting from the core operational topics, they can proactively embed sustainability into every business decision taken along the interactions across the supply chain, to those top strategic ones with the CXOs, where they can ensure resilience in the long term, while investing for the future of the company. I believe the larger aspect will still be about driving a transformative change management within these companies, where business leaders must execute together on the relentless vision that companies must drive a positive planetary and societal impact to ensure a profitable future.

It can be difficult to truly measure a company’s track record and accomplishments in terms of their environmentally friendly behaviour. What do you think has, until now, been mostly missed when discussing how green a company is?

Traditionally, along with a company’s sustainability report, ESG certifications and overall ESG ratings have been one of the many methods on how stakeholders have been assessing companies’ sustainable behaviour. Now looking at the rapidly developing regulations, many of which are mandatory and require reasonable assurance, responsible companies are increasingly backing up their sustainability ambitions by executing on real projects, relevant to their business, with measurable goals and impact. They are also updating their enterprise risk management strategy to include social and environmental aspects, which allows to preserve value and reduces downside exposure, helping to connect risk, strategy and decision-making, while enhancing corporate performance. Companies are also participating in global platforms like WBCSD Partnership for Carbon Transparency (PACT), demonstrating that they understand that collaboration across sectors, supply chains is key for driving Scope 3 data transparency. As greenwashing remains prevalent, all business actions are heavily scrutinized and hence, it’s very important that we are staying true to our sustainability efforts.