The major topics of geopolitical risk, artificial intelligence, and economic uncertainty consistently circled back to environmental exposure and long-term resilience, pointing to a broader shift: sustainability is becoming less of a separate agenda item and more an underlying consideration in enterprise risk and strategy.

For leaders looking to shape the next phase of business, two major and consequential themes emerged.

1. AI is a sustainability enabler with responsibilities

Artificial intelligence was central to many Davos discussions this year, including those touching on sustainability. The focus was less on experimentation and more on how AI is already influencing operational and strategic decisions.

In several sessions, leaders pointed to practical applications where AI, combined with sustainability and operational data, is helping organizations to reduce waste, improve resource efficiency, and better anticipate environmental risks.

At the same time, there was no lack of recognition that AI brings new challenges. Its growing energy and water requirements, along with questions around governance, transparency, and equity, featured prominently in discussions. Leaders emphasized the fact that AI鈥檚 sustainability value depends heavily on how well it is integrated into existing business systems and decision-making processes, rather than deployed as a standalone technology. This was also underscored by broader analysis showing that emerging regulatory frameworks are struggling to keep pace with AI鈥檚 environmental footprint and governance needs. 

For many organizations, the focus shifted towards while remaining aligned with enterprise governance and financial oversight.

2. Water is key to societal and economic stability

One of the most prominent sustainability topics at Davos 2026 was water. Across both formal and informal sessions, leaders discussed water and ocean health as a foundational element to stable societies, economies, and business continuity.

Much of the conversation focused on the growing gap between economic dependence on water and the level of investment dedicated to protecting and managing water systems. With a significant share of global GDP in the coming decades, participants highlighted the operational and financial implications for supply chains, production facilities, and communities. According to the , 31% of global GDP could be located in regions of high water stress by 2050, underscoring the urgency of rethinking water investment and risk. 

To this end, new collaborative initiatives were announced during the week, including efforts aimed at integrating water considerations more directly into corporate strategies and strengthening ocean stewardship across industries. For example:

• were selected at Davos to boost water resilience across infrastructure, industry, and agriculture systems. 
• were launched to accelerate water finance and investment ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference. 
• was directed at bridging the 鈧�6.5 trillion global water infrastructure gap, and commitments were made to mobilize private capital and improve water resilience strategies. 

These discussions signaled a move away from viewing water solely through a sustainability reporting lens and toward understanding it as a material risk and resilience issue for businesses.

What can business leaders take away?

While AI and water dominated the headlines at this annual meeting, sustainability quietly permeated most strategy meetings, with three takeaways arising as directional signals for leaders looking to build resilience into their business:

Sustainability is increasingly understood as financial risk

One of the clearest signals from Davos was the extent to which sustainability risks are now discussed in financial terms.

The World Economic Forum鈥檚 , released shortly before the meeting, reinforced this view by ranking environmental risks (including extreme weather and biodiversity loss) and critical changes to Earth systems among the most severe long-term global threats. The same report also highlighted that adverse outcomes from artificial intelligence are rising sharply in long-horizon risk rankings, reflecting growing concern about both technological and environmental disruption. 

While geopolitical and economic issues dominated short-term attention at the annual meeting, environmental risks were consistently framed as persistent factors shaping long-term planning and resilience strategies.

Furthermore, the role of the CFO is also evolving to meet sustainability requirements, including reporting non-financial KPIs, managing plastic and carbon taxes, steering the business, and aligning business decisions with carbon and environmental cost trade-offs. and management solutions can provide the capabilities needed to address CFO sustainability priorities.

As 麻豆原创 Chief Sustainability & Commercial Officer Sophia Mendelsohn noted during the week,聽“Sustainability remains firmly planted in both the Davos agenda and the minds of the CEO and CFO. The reality of climate change persists鈥攂oth its risks and opportunities, and they are already showing up on the balance sheet.“

For many executives, this framing reflects how sustainability considerations are increasingly influencing investment decisions, insurance strategies, and assessments of long-term enterprise value.

The focus is shifting from ambition to execution

Davos discussions also underscored a growing emphasis on execution. While sustainability remains firmly planted in the C-suite agenda, many leaders acknowledged a gap between ambition and implementation.

Despite years of commitments and target-setting, fewer than one in five companies have implemented climate adaptation and mitigation measures at scale. This is that helps explain why sustainability strategies are now evaluated more closely through the lens of financial feasibility, operational readiness, and data credibility.

In an environment where sustainability investments compete with other priorities, including AI and digital infrastructure, leaders emphasized the need for clear business cases and measurable outcomes. Sustainability initiatives that can demonstrate value creation and risk reduction are more likely to secure long-term support.

Integration decides whether sustainability insights lead to action

Data availability is no longer the primary challenge for most organizations. The tools to measure emissions, water use, climate exposure, and supplier impacts are widely accessible. What remains difficult is turning that information into decisions.

Across Davos, there was broad agreement that sustainability data needs to be integrated into core business systems for planning, procurement, asset management, and finance. When sustainability information sits outside these systems, it tends to inform reporting rather than operational or strategic action. When it is embedded, it can support more forward-looking decisions around resilience, investment, and supply chain design.

This shift toward integration reflects a broader understanding that sustainability efforts are most effective when they are aligned with how the business already operates.

connects business and sustainability data to help give full visibility across a company鈥檚 value chain, enabling it to align business objectives with sustainability priorities across areas like material choice, efficient transport and distribution, improved asset performance, and reduced carbon impact.

Davos 2026 clearly reflected a maturing phase of the sustainability conversation, one that is less about visibility and increasingly about how organizations can confidently prepare for the decade ahead.

For business leaders shaping sustainability strategies, there is a pressing need to make plans financially grounded, operationally integrated, and supported by reliable data.

Enterprise systems play an important role in this transition. When sustainability information is connected across business functions, leaders gain clearer insight into risk and opportunity, supporting more resilient and informed decision-making.

Monica Molesag is global head of Sustainability Communications at 麻豆原创.

In 2026, that distinction is becoming increasingly blurry.聽Extreme heat, water scarcity, flooding, wildfires, and energy volatility are affecting cost structures, disrupting supply chains, and constraining labor productivity and capital planning. These factors increasingly show up in routine operational and financial decisions and interact with broader economic dynamics. Climate impacts intersect with聽geopolitical competition, supply-side volatility, and regional fragmentation.聽At the same time, the transition to a low-carbon economy continues to progress unevenly across markets, with carbon increasingly subject to pricing, regulation, and disclosure expectations.

Together, physical climate impacts and transition pressures are influencing how companies plan, invest, and聽operate. Many organizations are approaching adaptation and mitigation as an integrated business capability, on par with聽financial management,聽supply chain聽planning,聽or cybersecurity.

Why adaptation and mitigation demand sustained leadership attention

聽projects that physical climate risks could more than triple corporate financial exposure by 2050, driven by asset damage, supply disruptions, and productivity losses. Despite this growing聽exposure,聽however, fewer than one in five companies have implemented adaptation measures at scale.

This widening gap between risk and readiness has profound implications for CEOs and聽boards, who聽recognize this threat. A聽聽found that business leaders聽identified聽extreme weather events as the greatest long-term business risk, with cascading effects across economic stability, supply chains, and social cohesion.聽Climate risk is now:

• Financial, affecting margins, asset values, insurance availability, and cost of capital
• Operational, disrupting production,聽logistics, and workforce availability
• Strategic, influencing where companies invest, source, and grow
• Reputational, shaping trust with investors, customers, regulators, and employees

For many leadership teams, climate adaptation and mitigation have become part of the broader challenge of enterprise readiness.聽In some cases, they are also influencing access to capital, insurance terms, talent聽attraction,聽and long-term market positioning.

Going beyond the contingency mindset

A common constraint on progress is how climate adaptation is still framed inside organizations.

When it is treated primarily as contingency planning, it tends to be reactive and episodic. Plans are developed, documented, and revisited only after disruption occurs, while ownership is often spread across risk, sustainability,聽operations,聽and finance teams with limited integration into core decision-making.

A capability-based approach works differently. Business capabilities are embedded and聽inform聽everyday decisions, supported by data, systems, governance, and incentives.

Climate capability聽emerges聽when organizations integrate climate risk, resilience, and carbon considerations into the core of how the enterprise runs.

The four pillars of climate capability

1. Supply chains designed for disruption

Global supply chains are increasingly exposed to climate volatility and regulatory pressure. Highly optimized, linear supply chains designed primarily for cost efficiency have shown limitations under these conditions. Many organizations are adjusting value chains to improve resilience and address emissions. Supplier diversification, regionalization, circular material flows, and better data sharing can reduce exposure to physical disruption and, in many cases, lower Scope 3 emissions. In practice, efforts to improve decarbonization and resilience often reinforce one another.

What this requires is more reliable,聽timely聽data across supply chains, so that COOs are empowered to turn insights into meaningful outcomes.

2. Assets and infrastructure built for a changing climate

Facilities, equipment, and聽logistics聽networks are increasingly exposed to chronic stresses, such as heat and water scarcity as well as acute events like flooding. At the same time, carbon-intensive assets face growing transition risk as energy systems and regulations evolve.

A capability-based approach evaluates assets through a dual lens: physical climate exposure and carbon intensity. This informs where companies聽locate聽facilities, how they聽maintain聽them, and when they invest in retrofits, electrification, or renewable energy.

Investments in energy efficiency and clean energy can reduce emissions while also moderating exposure to energy price volatility and supply disruptions.

3. Workforce resilience as a business priority

Climate impacts are also affecting people. Rising temperatures and extreme weather are already reducing labor productivity and increasing health and safety risks in many roles and regions.

聽estimates聽that heat stress alone could result in the equivalent of 80 million full-time jobs lost globally by 2030 under a 1.5掳C warming scenario. Organizations that treat workforce resilience as a core business issue are adjusting schedules, working conditions, training, and safety protocols, protecting people while maintaining productivity.

4. Financial decision-making informed by climate reality

Despite growing awareness, climate data is often still disconnected from financial planning and analysis.聽聽that while聽67% of companies聽identify聽climate-related risks with potential聽financial impact, only a fraction can quantify those risks with enough precision to guide investment decisions.

A capability-based approach incorporates carbon and climate risk into financial models. This allows leaders to assess physical risk, transition risk, and return on investment together, turning climate action into a disciplined, value-driven decision process.聽, like聽听补苍诲听, can empower organizations to drive actionable climate strategies and unlock measurable impact by helping them integrate sustainability into core business processes through the combination of trusted financial data and granular carbon insights.

A C-suite framework for climate capability in 2026

Across industries, five leadership actions will define those organizations building true climate capability:

1. Embed climate and carbon assumptions into core business planning and governance.
2. Redesign value chains for resilience and emissions reduction.
3. Protect assets and people with predictive, forward-looking insight.
4. Align mitigation and adaptation with financial strategy.
5. Measure resilience and emissions together, not in isolation.

Together, these actions help shift climate efforts from parallel initiatives into a managed enterprise capability, one that聽determines聽operational continuity, financial resilience, and long-term competitiveness.

聽about how you can build a more compliant, sustainable, and resilient business with 麻豆原创 Sustainability solutions.

Sophia Mendelsohn is chief sustainability and commercial officer at 麻豆原创.

鈥�Beyond Tech 鈥� Expanding Perspectives鈥� is about their stories. With this series, I hope to provide a glimpse into the inspiring minds I encounter, capturing their ideas to spark insight and innovation.

For the , I had the privilege of speaking with Nisha Bakker, director of Partnerships at The Ocean Cleanup, an organization proving that, with the right vision, evidence, and engineering, we can solve global challenges at scale.

Plastic is one of humanity鈥檚 greatest inventions and one of its most persistent problems. Durable, cheap, and versatile, it has transformed food security, medicine, logistics, and manufacturing. But that same durability means most of the plastic ever produced still exists today. And much of it has ended up where it shouldn鈥檛: in our rivers, our oceans, our ecosystems鈥攅ven our bodies.

Today, the world produces . Production is still rising, projected to grow 66 percent by 2040, even as waste management systems are overwhelmed. Only nine percent of plastic is recycled globally. A third is mismanaged, left to leak into the environment through open dumping, unregulated landfills, and littering. As a result, have accumulated in rivers and lakes, far more than the 30 million tons in the oceans themselves.

Rivers are the main conveyor belt carrying waste to the sea. In 2020 alone, 1.4 million tons of plastic flowed from rivers into the ocean. Without intervention, this will more than double by 2060. Just a thousand rivers account for 80 percent of this flow, largely in rapidly developing economies where growth, urbanization, and weak waste systems collide.

This is where has focused its mission. The organization aims to rid the world鈥檚 oceans of plastic through a comprehensive strategy that includes removing legacy plastic accumulated in the ocean and along coastlines while also stopping new plastic pollution from entering the marine environment. Their ambition is bold and unambiguous: to put themselves out of business by 2040.

Data, vision the difference in cleanup efforts

During our conversation, Nisha explained how the work is driven not only by passion, but by evidence. 鈥淵ou could look at a river, see the problem, and start removing plastic immediately,鈥� she said. 鈥淏ut we first determine the best place to remove it, and then build the entire value chain around it鈥攊ncluding recycling, operators, permits, and long-term partners. Data is what sets us apart.鈥�

Behind every cleanup is an enormous amount of engineering and analysis. The Ocean Cleanup鈥檚 teams map political, economic, and social dynamics in each country with an affected river system. They deploy trackers to understand how fast plastic moves, where it gets stuck, and how seasonal changes from monsoons to dry months affect pollution flows. Cameras equipped with detection algorithms help quantify volumes and patterns. Modelling and simulations guide where to deploy Interceptor systems and how to scale them.

This foundation of data explains their success: more than 46 million kilograms of waste intercepted and removed from marine and freshwater environments, thanks to System 03, their towed ocean technology spanning over 2.2 kilometers, which can clean an area the size of a football field in five seconds; and over 20 Interceptor systems deployed across the world鈥檚 most polluted rivers. The organization recently unveiled plans to tackle up to a third of all plastic emissions from rivers through its 30 Cities Program, targeting urban centers with important waterways and major pollution problems.

But as Nisha stressed, cleanup is only one part of the solution. 鈥淲e鈥檙e buying time for systemic change,鈥� she told me. 鈥淯ltimately you need governments, producers, recyclers, and communities working together.鈥�

There are signs of progress: more than 90 countries now have plastic bag bans; extended producer responsibility regulations are expanding; and negotiations toward a global plastics treaty have brought unprecedented international attention to the issue despite agreement remaining elusive.

The importance of systems

What struck me most in our discussion was the philosophy that drives The Ocean Cleanup. With employees from 40 nationalities, they are building bridges across sectors, disciplines, and geographies. They are proving what is possible when a global movement is anchored in evidence-based design and relentless experimentation.

At 麻豆原创, we recognize this mindset. Helping the world run better and improving people鈥檚 lives requires more than intention; it requires agile systems capable of putting insights at the fingertips of business. That鈥檚 why The Ocean Cleanup relies on 麻豆原创 to deliver on its mission. Every hour they spend building business systems is an hour not spent developing ocean systems, river systems, or new engineering solutions. Our role is to provide a stable, integrated digital foundation so they can focus on innovation, not administration. Technology should accelerate impact and enable scale, not get in the way of it.

The same is true for every organization. Whether fighting pollution, reimagining supply chains, or transforming business models, the biggest breakthroughs happen when you combine purpose with technology that can support it. Clean, connected data, intelligent processes, and applications that automate what can be automated so people can focus on what matters most: This is why 麻豆原创 is more relevant than ever.

The Ocean Cleanup shows what is possible when bold ideas meet the right technology and the right partnerships. This is exactly the type of conversation I look forward to bringing you through Beyond Tech 鈥� Expanding Perspectives, stories of inspiring minds that demonstrate that the future is not something we predict, but something we build together.

Manos Raptopoulos is global president of Customer Success, Europe, APAC, Middle East & Africa, and a member of the Extended Board at 麻豆原创.

麻豆原创鈥檚 goal is equally clear: enhancing our sustainability impact to help the world run better and improve people鈥檚 lives. The question is how do we navigate this complex terrain without losing our way?

The challenge: from sustainability metrics to actionable insights

Corporate sustainability reporting has evolved significantly in recent years. However, many organizations still face the fundamental challenge of translating complex environmental and social data into insights that drive strategic change.

Sustainability metrics such as 鈥�0.15 micrograms of fine dust per cubic meter鈥� or 鈥渇ive liters of water consumed鈥� are scientifically accurate but difficult to interpret, especially for decision-makers without deep sustainability expertise. Just as hikers need a reliable navigation system, businesses need a common language to translate diverse sustainability indicators into comparable, actionable insights.

This is where impact measurement and valuation (IMV) comes into play.

The approach: how IMV translates complexity into business-relevant insights

麻豆原创鈥檚 IMV approach encompasses three steps.

Step one: A language everyone understands鈥�translating societal impacts into monetary units

The IMV framework quantifies the costs and benefits of corporate activities to society and the environment. It builds on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data that many companies already report and translates these into a single monetary metric, for example, Euros or U.S. dollars.

This is like moving from vague trail descriptions to precise GPS coordinates that everyone can understand. When sustainability indicators are expressed in a common unit, companies can clearly see where they stand, evaluate trade-offs between different sustainability dimensions, and compare them alongside financial impacts.

As a tangible example, the environmental impact of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be monetized by multiplying a company鈥檚 reported emissions by the social cost of carbon, . This converts abstract data into a clear, actionable signal, allowing companies to compare impacts across different ESG and financial indicators. With this clarity, businesses can focus on the most impactful sustainability initiatives鈥攖hose that deliver the greatest contribution to GHG reduction goals while evaluating both financial and sustainability return on investment.

Step two: Determining relative position鈥攃omparing performance to peers

Once you know your exact position, you need a reference point to understand how well you鈥檙e performing. It’s like trail runners who want not only to reach the summit, but also to understand their performance along the way. Your GPS shows you where you are, but to improve, you need to compare your data against other runners.

Impact benchmarks complement IMV by providing reference values that show how a company鈥檚 sustainability performance compares to industry peers. These benchmarks act like performance markers, helping businesses identify where they are ahead, behind, or on par鈥攇uiding decisions to improve toward maximum positive impact.

Step three: Identifying hotspots鈥攆ocusing on maximum impact

The global sustainability agenda demands urgent, focused action. IMV and impact benchmarks together provide data-driven insights that pinpoint where a business has the greatest leverage to amplify positive and reduce negative impacts.

For example, in 麻豆原创鈥檚 human rights risk assessment and double materiality analysis, these insights helped narrow down the most material sustainability topics, critical value chain stages, and high-risk countries or industries. This approach uncovers opportunities where improved sustainability performance drives long-term competitive advantage and highlights risks such as supply chain vulnerabilities and regulatory exposure.

Navigating together: collaboration for sustainable impact

麻豆原创 has adopted this methodology as a founding member of the (VBA), a nonprofit coalition of multinational companies dedicated to establishing a globally accepted sustainability management accounting and steering system. In collaboration with the , a scientific research organization specializing in impact valuation, 麻豆原创 has analyzed its societal impacts (step one), applied industry benchmarks to contextualize performance (step two), and integrated these insights into core reporting and steering processes (step three).聽

This collaborative approach ensures that the data guiding 麻豆原创鈥檚 sustainability strategy is independent, credible, and scientifically validated, enhancing both internal decision-making and transparency for investors and external stakeholders.

“Impact measurement and valuation provides the scientific foundation for sustainability steering, allowing organizations like 麻豆原创 to understand their impacts holistically and prioritize decisions based on statistical evidence.”

Dr. Richard Scholz, Head of Impact Analysis at WifOR

The results: what 麻豆原创鈥檚 analysis reveals and how it drives strategic decision-making

The graphic below illustrates 麻豆原创鈥檚 sustainability performance compared to industry benchmarks, the result of step two. The analysis covers 麻豆原创鈥檚 entire supply chain from direct suppliers to sub-suppliers as well as 麻豆原创鈥檚 own operations. A methodology for quantifying downstream impacts, such as the effects of software in use, is currently under development.

The analysis identifies both positive and negative impacts. Areas where 麻豆原创 shows a higher negative impact than the industry average are highlighted in red, indicating priority areas for mitigation. In contrast, smaller negative or larger positive impacts indicate stronger ESG performance.

Key findings

• Social performance: Supply chain data reveal mixed results regarding living wages. While most supply chain workers earn above living wage thresholds, reflecting positive impacts, the analysis also identified risk hotspots, enabling 麻豆原创 to take targeted action. In response, the Human Rights team at 麻豆原创 partnered with procurement, suppliers, and multi-stakeholder initiatives to develop and implement risk mitigation strategies. IMV data allowed these efforts to focus on the countries, industries, and vendors with the highest risk, ensuring that improvements are driven where they matter most.
• Environmental performance: GHG emissions results reflect strong progress toward 麻豆原创鈥檚 , with positive results across both direct operations and upstream activities. While water consumption is not considered material for 麻豆原创 at the group level, we address identified local hotspots through local environmental management programs, including site-specific water management measures to ensure responsible resource use.

Leading by example

As a global technology company supporting the majority of the world鈥檚 business transactions, next to enabling our customers on their positive impact journey through our solutions, we want to lead by example.

Our corporate sustainability approach creates positive economic, social, and environmental impact while respecting planetary boundaries and human rights.

To achieve these goals, 麻豆原创 relies on tools such as IMV that help us assess and prioritize the measures with the greatest leverage鈥攎aximizing positive impacts and minimizing negative ones.

“Sustainable transformation is only possible when we base our decisions on reliable data. With IMV, we make sustainability measurable, comparable, and actionable. This enables us to create transparency, set clear priorities, and take responsibility. By focusing on areas where we can achieve the greatest positive business and sustainability impact, we ensure that our actions are both meaningful and effective.”

Matthias Medert, Global Head of Sustainability at 麻豆原创

The journey ahead

The climb toward impact-based decision-making continues. Just as hikers rely on navigation tools to traverse challenging terrain, we use IMV as our guide to ensure every step brings us closer to our sustainability goals.

Looking ahead, we aim to expand the methodology, contribute to cross-industry standardization, and foster multi-stakeholder collaboration to accelerate the adoption of impact-based decision-making across global value chains. Through 麻豆原创 cloud solutions for sustainable enterprises, we support our customers in their own impact management journeys.

Our climb is guided by more than metrics; it鈥檚 driven by purpose. Clear insights from IMV keep us on the right path toward a future where sustainability and business success go hand in hand.

Iris Konrad is a senior sustainability specialist at 麻豆原创.

The step is part of the digital transformation needed to support the organization鈥檚 global mission.

The Ocean Cleanup focuses on reducing plastic pollution in rivers and oceans, operates internationally, and is growing rapidly. To date, the organization has already removed more than 40 million kilograms of waste.

However, its ambitions go further: by 2040, The Ocean Cleanup aims to have removed 90 percent of floating ocean plastic and cleaned up plastic pollution in 90 river cities. This represents a major scale-up of the work, with more activities and installations in rivers and oceans worldwide.

Flexible growth

To properly manage global processes and support international activities, The Ocean Cleanup urgently needed a modern and scalable system. The Dutch nonprofit organization chose to replace its existing system with 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition.

The modern ERP platform enables The Ocean Cleanup to achieve its growth ambitions: the system is easily scalable and can be flexibly adapted as processes, projects, or international activities expand.

A strong foundation for global collaboration is essential. For example, financial teams must work closely with fundraisers to optimally distribute donations across international projects while project teams, engineers, and data analysts coordinate daily on technology, planning, and budgets for initiatives in rivers and oceans worldwide.

鈥淧erfect coordination between teams is essential; we hunt plastic together as a pack,鈥� Aurelia Ferraro, senior partnership manager at The Ocean Cleanup, shared. 鈥淭he system helps us with that collaboration, allowing us to respond quickly to new challenges.鈥�

鈥淲e are growing exponentially, and our internal processes have become increasingly complex, with operations spanning multiple countries,鈥� Ferraro further explained. 鈥溌槎乖� S/4HANA is the ideal system to manage that complexity.鈥�

She emphasized that the transformation is about more than just technology: 鈥淐hange and innovation are always complex, but our organization is accustomed to change. We invest a lot of energy in communication and training, which ensures smooth 麻豆原创 adoption.鈥�

Fast implementation and configuration

Joost van Lankveld is a strategic advisor at Scheer Nederland, The Ocean Cleanup’s implementation partner. He added: 鈥淭ogether with The Ocean Cleanup, we are following a phased implementation. 麻豆原创’s 80-20 fit-to-standard approach allows us to implement quickly, after which we configure specific processes in 麻豆原创 according to The Ocean Cleanup’s needs.鈥�

The implementation began with financial administration and purchasing modules for five Dutch entities. The upcoming phases will include project management and logistics modules that provide insight into The Ocean Cleanup’s complex river and ocean projects. The organization expects to complete the transition to 麻豆原创 S/4HANA by the end of 2025.

Patricia Bueters is a senior integrated communications manager at 麻豆原创 Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg).

The system was developed by 麻豆原创 Japan and INSPIRATION PLUS, a venture from Oita University focused on disaster prevention.

EDiSON, which runs on 麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform, exemplifies how intelligent enterprise technology can be harnessed to address global challenges such as cyclones (typhoons) and floods. It integrates diverse types of information, including real-time, visual meteorological data and historical data records, to drive predictive insights and smarter operations assisted by 麻豆原创 Business AI and machine learning.

These predictions offer authorities a vital tool for delivering faster response times and mitigating damage in the event of a natural disaster. This includes forecasting terrain damage, dispatching emergency services to affected areas and supporting decision-making in issuing evacuation advisories. The Solomon Islands initiative is envisioned as a blueprint for other small island developing states, showcasing how cutting-edge technology can democratize disaster resilience.

鈥淓DiSON represents a leap forward in how science and technology can empower vulnerable communities,鈥� UNESCO Chief of Disaster Risk Reduction Soichiro Yasukawa said. 鈥淏y integrating AI and real-time data, we are not only improving early warning capabilities but also building a foundation for long-term resilience and sustainable development.鈥�

The project, part of UNESCO鈥檚 Disaster Prevention Strengthening Program, will be operational in 2026. It aims to establish a scalable, data-driven model for disaster preparedness and responses of small island nations that face the increasing severity of natural disasters driven by climate change. The Solomon Islands, located in the South Pacific Ocean, face frequent threats from earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, droughts and flooding. EDiSON will serve as a transformative solution to enhance national preparedness and response capabilities.

EDiSON integrates static and real-time dynamic data from government, municipal and private sector sources. The system delivers predictive insights and real-time visibility into emerging disaster risks. This empowers authorities to issue timely evacuation orders and make informed decisions that protect lives and infrastructure.

Why EDiSON? Proven Performance and Scalable Sustainability

鈥淭his project exemplifies 麻豆原创鈥檚 commitment to using technology to empower resilient communities,鈥� said Sophia Mendelsohn, chief sustainability and commercial officer at 麻豆原创 SE. 鈥淓DiSON is a powerful example of how our cloud platform and AI capabilities can be tailored to meet the needs of communities facing real-world challenges. We鈥檙e proud to support UNESCO in bringing this innovation to the Solomon Islands and beyond.鈥�

UNESCO鈥檚 selection of EDiSON was driven by the system鈥檚 proven track record in Japan鈥攁 country renowned for its advanced disaster management systems. The system鈥檚 ability to overcome traditional barriers such as fragmented data, limited analytical capacity and underutilization in field operations makes it especially valuable for resource-constrained nations such as the Solomon Islands. EDiSON鈥檚 modular design helps ensure scalability and adaptability, enabling governments to deploy sophisticated disaster management tools without requiring extensive budgets or technical expertise.

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Media Contact:
Lesa Plingen, +49 622 776 9000, lesa.plingen@sap.com, CET
麻豆原创 麻豆原创 Room; press@sap.com

This document contains forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors section of 麻豆原创鈥檚 2024 Annual Report on Form 20-F.
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It’s a mindset shift 麻豆原创 is already embracing to help our customers build genuine business resilience. It lies not just in reducing our own emissions, but in actively supporting and financing the restoration of the natural systems that underpin global economic stability.

The business case for nature-based initiatives

The interdependence between business and nature is no longer theoretical. Today, US$44 trillion of economic value generation depends directly on nature. From food systems that sustain people to water resources, natural capital forms the invisible infrastructure of the global economy. Yet this foundation is eroding rapidly, creating systemic risks that no company can ignore.

For 麻豆原创, investing in forest ecosystems is not just philanthropy, it’s risk management. By financing and supporting nature-based climate projects, we can protect ourselves and our stakeholders against the loss of natural capital while strengthening our position as a sustainability leader. These investments provide opportunities to regenerate the ecosystems that our economies and societies depend on for food, water, medicine, and sustainable growth.

A comprehensive approach to net-zero

In our mission to help the world run better and improve people’s lives, 麻豆原创 has committed to achieving net-zero emissions along our entire value chain by 2030, aligned with the science-based 1.5掳C future outlined in the Paris Agreement negotiated at COP21 in in 2015, 20 years ahead of our original target. This accelerated timeline reflects both urgency and ambition.

Until 2030, 麻豆原创 is committed to financing projects that reduce and remove more CO₂ from the atmosphere than our own operations鈥攊ncluding scope 1 and 2 emissions plus business travel鈥攑roduce each year. This commitment means we’re taking responsibility for the impact of our business operations while we scale up our decarbonization efforts.

This strategy follows a clear hierarchy: avoid and reduce emissions first, then neutralize what remains. We’re working to reduce gross greenhouse gas emissions by 90% across our value chain on a market-based accounting approach. The remaining emissions, no more than 10%, in line with Science Based Targets initiative standards, will be neutralized through high-quality, verified carbon removal projects spanning both nature-based and engineered solutions.

Matthias Medert, global head of Sustainability at 麻豆原创 SE, says: 鈥淥ur reduction efforts have earned 麻豆原创’s inclusion in the EU Paris-Aligned Benchmarks, giving investors confidence in our approach and demonstrating that rigorous action to tackle global issues strengthens rather than compromises business performance.鈥�

Nature-based carbon finance in action

Since 2012, 麻豆原创 has been building one of the most comprehensive corporate reforestation programs in the technology sector. To date, we have planted 20.51 million trees towards our commitment in 2024 to plant 25 million trees by 2030 while restoring more land than our offices and data centers occupy.

These aren’t isolated exercises. Through long-term investment in the , 麻豆原创 is supporting comprehensive 10- to 20-year projects that combine reforestation, forest protection, improved forest management, rural energy, and agroforestry initiatives implemented directly with local communities. These initiatives restore degraded natural ecosystems, improve the livelihoods of rural populations, and facilitate transitions to efficient rural energy and regenerative agriculture.

In addition to this, to help advance its mission to secure the Amazon rainforest鈥檚 future. By tracking 15 strategic KPIs鈥攊ncluding deforestation rates and production chain revenue鈥攁nd sharing data with stakeholders through the 麻豆原创 Sustainability Control Tower solution, FAS is steering its efforts with accurate and reliable ESG data, positively impacting preservation efforts in the Amazon, home to not only the greatest fresh water reserve on the Earth, but around 390 billion trees and to 2.2 million indigenous people across 400 ethnic groups whose traditional knowledge is essential to the conservation of local and global biodiversity.

Partnerships amplifying impact

As a member of the corporate alliance managed by the World Economic Forum, 麻豆原创 is contributing to the collective goal of conserving and restoring multiple ecosystems around the world, supporting projects in over 25 countries, including Brazil, Madagascar, and the Philippines.

Technology can drive indirect reforestation as well. Through a partnership with , the not-for-profit search engine, every 50 searches made by 麻豆原创 employees support the planting of new trees and investments in sustainable developments. This partnership has resulted in over 760,000 trees planted to date, while employees conduct their work and maintain their privacy through anonymized search queries.

Beyond nature-based solutions, we have partnered with , investing in engineered carbon removal through its Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology. This diversified portfolio approach helps ensure that we’re supporting the full spectrum of solutions needed.

Connecting to COP30 and the Tropical Forest Forever Facility

麻豆原创’s approach to climate finance aligns powerfully with emerging global frameworks, particularly the (TFFF) initiative, a top financing priority for Brazil’s COP30 presidency. The TFFF, formally launched last week at COP30 in Bel茅m, is designed to provide long-term, predictable financing for conserving and expanding tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests.

This initiative reflects a critical evolution in climate finance thinking. Nearly 100 countries, representing two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions, have submitted or announced new Nationally Determined Contribution targets that include strategies to safeguard forests. 麻豆原创’s multi-year investments in the demonstrate the kind of long-term, community-centered approach that the COP30 presidency seeks to scale globally. Our experience shows that when corporations commit to sustained financing with integrity and transparency, the impacts multiply: carbon is sequestered, biodiversity rebounds, communities build resilience, and businesses thrive.

Corporate action beyond the value chain

Provided it doesn’t undermine current corporate decarbonization programs, the financial muscle of corporations can bridge critical gaps in parts of the world where funds aren鈥檛 sufficiently available to restore ecosystems and build strong, durable economies and livelihoods.

Sustained corporate financial contributions provide quantifiable benefits to strengthen business resilience beyond 麻豆原创’s own value chain, delivering positive impacts for local and global populations and for biodiversity. Through collaboration, transparency, and technology, we’re proving that climate action isn’t just compatible with long-term business success, it’s essential to it.

The question for business leaders isn’t whether to invest in climate finance, but how quickly they can scale their commitments. The resilience of our businesses, our economies, and our planet depends on the actions we take today.

Learn more about and how we support our customer鈥檚

Karen Restrepo 脕vila is Sustainability and Net-Zero communications lead at 麻豆原创.

The new regulation will require companies to account for carbon emissions on select imported products. For the auto industry, the steel and aluminum categories are especially critical.

Complete automobiles are not currently covered by CBAM, but the automotive sector is among the most exposed because of its dependence on emissions-intensive materials. Components such as body panels, chassis, frames, and battery enclosures rely heavily on imported steel and aluminum.

CBAM is currently in its transition phase and will enter the definitive phase on January 1, 2026, meaning that companies need to track their imported emissions on covered products throughout 2026 and begin purchasing certificates for those imported, tracked emissions in February 2027, with the first report due August 2027.

CBAM costs will add up quickly

The modern passenger vehicle contains around 1 tonne of steel and 200 kilograms of aluminum. Global averages hover around per tonne of manufactured steel, and each tonne of primary aluminum produces around .

With analysts projecting could reach 鈧�150 per tonne of CO鈧� by 2030, a newly manufactured vehicle could soon be subject to 鈧�300 in CBAM certificate costs, assuming manufacturers import 20% of the necessary steel and 54% of the required aluminum, consistent with EU import data. Given that Germany produced in 2024, German automakers and component manufacturers could be on the hook for about 鈧�1.2 billion in CBAM certificate purchases in 2027.*

Looking past 2027, the European Commission plans to add categories like chemicals and plastics to the regulation, bringing more auto parts under the CBAM umbrella and making it even more important for European automakers and component manufacturers to solidify their CBAM strategies today.

CBAM preparations for automakers and component manufacturers

Across the EU automotive industry, companies seem insufficiently prepared for the new phase of CBAM.

While companies are actively preparing for upcoming CBAM regulations,聽their ability to act is constrained by the lack of a finalized EU regulatory framework, including the methodology for emissions-value calculations and the associated verification rules. That said, regulators already clarified the scope of companies that must report and the timelines to purchase certificates.

With this information, it鈥檚 now crunch time for European automakers and component manufacturers to get ready for the rules taking effect in January 2026. Here鈥檚 what they should prioritize.

1. Get familiar with CBAM and evaluate your process

The core elements of CBAM have been defined and companies must act now. If you haven鈥檛 done so yet, start by understanding the overall process and requirements.

If you are in scope鈥攎eaning you meet the de minimis threshold of either importing more than 50 tonnes of CBAM affected goods per year or 100 tonnes of embedded CO鈧� annually鈥攄etermine which parts of your supply chain are most affected. Identify your top suppliers and imported goods, develop a focused approach for obtaining actual emissions data from those suppliers, and assess the potential financial impact. As more materials come under the scope of CBAM, and as the carbon ETS prices rise, the financial impact will increase in the years ahead. Companies must prepare to meet these new obligations and manage this financial impact.

2. Collaborate with your suppliers

Identify and focus on your most critical suppliers鈥攖ypically the top 50 to 100鈥攁nd build a targeted engagement plan while defining an informed approach for the broader supplier base. Consider updating procurement terms to require future data sharing and provide support to suppliers in educating and calculating emissions where needed. Close collaboration will be essential to obtain actual emissions data to avoid the more expensive default values and identify decarbonization potentials. 

Accessing trusted supplier data is one of the biggest challenges facing companies today.

While the EU provides mechanisms for data exchange between suppliers and importers, , an industry network for the European automotive sector, in combination with third-party data exchange software, offers an alternative to collecting trusted, standardized emissions data. Catena-X enables companies to collaborate and share data in a trusted environment. It brings together manufacturers, technology providers, and suppliers to standardize data sharing processes across the value chain. Beyond data exchange, these networks foster knowledge sharing, allowing members to learn best practices, align on standards, and accelerate compliance readiness collectively.

To participate, companies typically register with the network, adopt certified software that supports standardized data exchange, and begin collaborating with other members. This approach ensures interoperability and automates trusted emissions data collection. Catena-X is actively refining its scope and standards to support CBAM.

3. Find the right technology for your business

Most importantly, you want to find the right technology partner that will streamline CBAM reporting and support the integration of carbon into core financial accounting processes.

The EU CBAM report requires a lot of data, all of which can be requested, filled, and reported automatically using actual emissions values with tailored, ERP-based systems. The 麻豆原创 Green Token solution can support CBAM declarant reporting by enabling standardized, auditable reporting workflows. The 麻豆原创 Green Ledger solution will manage the certificate repository and help ensure financial and carbon accounting of CBAM emissions and certificates in alignment with accounting standards like US GAAP and IFRS (planned for H1 2026).

Manual processes, like e-mails and Excel files, are prone to error, do not scale, and will make CBAM compliance time-consuming and resource intensive.

Prepare your systems for CBAM compliance

CBAM is set to reshape material sourcing in the automotive industry by introducing carbon as a cost factor and driving transparency across global supply chains.

The ideal scenario for automakers and component manufacturers is to take decisive actions to decarbonize鈥攕uch as sourcing low-emissions steel and aluminum, increasing circularity efforts, and optimizing product design to use less CBAM materials鈥攚hile fully automating CBAM compliance.

Access to accurate data on supply chain emissions鈥攁nd their financial implications鈥攑rovides the insights that business leaders need to decarbonize and reduce risk in the years ahead.

The right combination of software tools and industry network collaboration can enable cost-optimized and automated CBAM compliance and deliver valuable supply chain intelligence. can deliver measurable ROI by automating data collection and workflows and enabling finance teams to move beyond manual processes toward strategic analysis and action. This helps create a scalable foundation for ongoing carbon cost management while supporting standardized data exchange and collaboration across the value chain.

Start preparing now to ensure your business thrives as the 2026 CBAM definitive phase approaches.

Read the CBAM and watch the CBAM to learn more.

Thomas Janzen is an industry expert at 麻豆原创 SE.

*This is a back of the napkin calculation to illustrate the potential impact. This is based on data that shows the EU imported 27.4 million tonnes of finished steel products in 2024. The EU consumed about 129 million tonnes. Therefore, we assume  imports account for roughly 20% of EU steel use. In , 54% of the aluminum used in the EU came from imports. Using these averages means about 2 tonnes of imported CO2 per vehicle, or 鈧�300, assigning 20% of 1 tonne of steel emissions and 53% of 200kg of aluminum emissions.

Through their innovative implementation of Soley’s Product Mining Platform with 麻豆原创’s supply chain management technologies, they prove that sustainability and profitability can go hand in hand.

The challenge: managing complex product portfolios at scale

CERATIZIT Group, a leading provider of hard material solutions for machining and wear protection, faced a challenge common to many modern manufacturing companies: managing a complex product portfolio with over 65,000 products. The company’s Cutting Tool Solutions division needed a solution to balance economic and ecological objectives while maintaining competitive advantage.

Klaus Lupfer, product lifecycle manager at CERATIZIT Deutschland GmbH, explains the company’s motivation: “In addition to the economic perspective on the product portfolio, the ecological aspect was equally important when partnering with Soley. As a company committed to sustainability for years, we are especially excited about the opportunities that the expansion of product carbon footprint data offers.”

The challenge was not just the product portfolio’s size but also the lack of transparency regarding product performance and sustainability metrics. Employees spent considerable time compiling reports rather than making strategic decisions, while limited insights into critical materials and suppliers prevented efficient phaseout of high-emission products.

AI-powered product portfolio analysis

Munich-based Soley GmbH, a past participant in the 麻豆原创.iO program, 麻豆原创鈥檚 former startup accelerator designed to foster and integrate innovative solutions into the 麻豆原创 ecosystem, developed an innovative response to this challenge. The Soley Product Mining Platform, available as part of 麻豆原创’s extension and add-on solutions, transforms complex product data into actionable insights through three core, AI-driven innovations that enable faster, smarter, and more impactful business decisions.

• AI Advisor uses AI to recommend precise actions鈥攆or example, suggesting which products should be phased out to minimize carbon footprint without sacrificing margins.
• AI Assistant provides an intuitive, natural-language interface that allows users to effortlessly interact with Soley, without requiring deep technical expertise.
• AI Detective analyzes data to uncover hidden dependencies and reveal strategic opportunities, such as identifying which configuration options should be eliminated to optimize both profitability and sustainability.

The Soley Product Mining Platform draws data from 麻豆原创 S/4HANA and 麻豆原创 Business Warehouse, utilizing 麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform (麻豆原创 BTP) as the service layer. 麻豆原创 Datasphere helps consolidate 麻豆原创 data and analytics, while 麻豆原创 Analytics Cloud provides the analytics that form the core of the AI model. This technical architecture enables intelligent data extraction and transformation through 麻豆原创 Databricks, while massive graph analytics enable complex dependency analysis.

“With these 麻豆原创 solutions, we’re delivering a true game changer for the sustainability of the high tech and manufacturing industries,” says Ephraim Triemer, shareholder and advisor of Enterprise Accounts at Soley. “For the first time, our customers can go beyond ESG reporting and take real action鈥攄riving sustainability while staying laser focused on profitability.”

Seamless 麻豆原创 integration creates value

By combining CERATIZIT’s Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) data with financial metrics, the Soley Product Mining Platform creates a digital twin that uncovers opportunities, identifies risks, and analyzes product hierarchies, bills of materials, and carbon footprints. With AI-driven intelligence guidance, Soley developers ensure the platform’s capabilities enable decisions and outcomes that improve both profitability and environmental stewardship.

Earlier this year, Dominik Metzger was appointed as president and Chief Product Officer of 麻豆原创 Supply Chain Management, bringing a renewed focus on resilience, sustainability, and intelligent automation.

鈥淢y chief priority is to ensure that we help customers not only respond to disruptions but also proactively prepare and act,鈥� Metzger said. 鈥淲e can do so by leveraging AI, generative AI, real-time data, and predictive analytics with the power of 麻豆原创鈥檚 technology. Our vision is to build an autonomous supply chain鈥攃onnected, contextualized, and collaborative.鈥�

麻豆原创 SCM leadership driving transformation

The analysis delivered impressive, measurable results that demonstrate the power of combining AI-driven analytics with 麻豆原创 technologies. CERATIZIT discovered an 87% implementation rate of suggested measures, driving product sustainability and supply chain optimization. Simultaneously, the company identified a reduction of over 30% in end-of-life “ballast” products with negative carbon footprints while creating 100% transparency in sustainability data across all elements, product sets, and aggregation levels.

Alexander Springer, CEO of Soley GmbH, explains the strategic significance: “If you know which products are the most critical to the overall success of your business, you can focus on safeguarding the value chain for those products, taking proactive steps to avoid any potential supply risks.”

A model for sustainable digital transformation

The successful partnership between CERATIZIT, Soley, and 麻豆原创 demonstrates how modern companies can achieve both economic and ecological goals through intelligent use of data and AI. The combination of proven 麻豆原创 technologies and innovative analytics solutions creates measurable value for companies of all sizes. For other 麻豆原创 customers and partners, this example shows that sustainability and profitability need not be opposing forces鈥攚ith the right technologies and partners, both objectives can be achieved simultaneously.

Learn more about the latest updates to 麻豆原创 supply chain management. The Soley Product Mining Platform is available on .

Since 2021, 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management has been 麻豆原创’s key solution for efficient carbon management. We are excited to share major new updates, both delivered and planned, as the solution evolves into a new phase: one where customers rely on 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management as their single source for environmental footprints beyond carbon.

麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management is an ERP-centric, AI-enabled foundation to help calculate, analyze, and manage your company’s environmental impacts. Read on for details about changes that enable companies to move beyond carbon reporting and turn sustainability into competitive advantage.

A single source for scalable footprint calculations, optimization, and reporting

Companies today face growing pressures: meeting evolving regulations and standards, rising investor expectations, high carbon and emissions-related costs, and data insights that flow back into processes like procurement, finance, or strategic planning.

As companies seek to keep up, they need highly accurate footprint data that is grounded in actual business data. Delivered and upcoming updates to 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management extend footprint calculations beyond CO2 emissions to include other impact categories, such as land use, energy, waste, and abiotic resource depletion. With insights into more environmental levers, your company can fulfill the most common reporting standards, manage risk, decrease costs, and control externalities.

麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management can turn fragmented data into integrated, actionable insights. By leveraging actual business data from 麻豆原创 Cloud ERP and enriching it with additional sources such as energy flows and supplier information, it helps automate the calculation of accurate, audit-ready footprints at both corporate and product levels. Embedded into core business processes like procurement and finance, these insights enable companies to move beyond compliance-driven reporting toward strategic sustainability that can drive competitive advantage.

Updates to 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management extend the same data governance, auditability, and automation to more impact areas. From the corporate level down to individual products, this enables calculations of actual footprints鈥攏ot just estimates鈥攆or numerous environmental factors. Automation and AI capabilities help reduce manual effort, while high data quality can ensure that reporting is detailed and decision-making is well-informed.

One foundation, many environmental levers and business outcomes

Staying competitive in a changing global environment and driving change make it critical to identify ways to reduce costs and invest in AI-based technology. Because 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management is deeply integrated with , it can enable customers to gain transparency across their entire supply chain鈥攖hereby making sustainability actionable and surfacing sustainability insights where decisions are made across the enterprise.

麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management is the single source of truth that can be embedded across your operations, turning reporting into business value.

The new phase of 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management moves from compliance-driven reporting to steering and value creation. The updates are part of 麻豆原创’s vision to transform sustainability data into a catalyst for long-term business value. Our approach to sustainability treats environmental footprint calculations鈥攏ow with an expanded scope in 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management鈥攁s a strategic asset that enables businesses to make business decisions like:

• Innovating products and services to decrease environmental impact and support a more circular economy
• Driving environmentally-sound value chains with better material sourcing and design decisions
• Identifying ways to increase resource efficiency, create new revenue streams, and achieve higher margins
• Budget and optimize for environmental related costs, like anticipated carbon usage
• Building a strategic relationship with suppliers and manufacturers, leveraging sustainability data to drive mutual growth and competitiveness

麻豆原创鈥檚 suite of sustainability solutions can enable reporting, insights, and confident decision-making across every process, product, and partner network. Our approach helps bridge the gap between sustainability, finances, and operations. 麻豆原创鈥檚 portfolio of sustainability solutions is evolving to make sustainability actionable, measurable, and more embedded, powered by AI, trusted data, and deep process integrations.

Listen to the recent to learn how BASF Coatings uses 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management to calculate, manage, and reduce environmental impact. Check out other 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management updates here.

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Gunther Rothermel is chief product officer for 麻豆原创 Sustainability.

AI, with already proven applications, can unlock insights to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by . , over half of sustainability executives say one of their top actions in the next three years is expanding their use of AI to enhance ESG capabilities.

Most businesses have not yet realized AI鈥檚 full potential for sustainability. In fact, are using AI today to reduce carbon emissions. But those ready to do so will gain a decisive advantage that goes beyond emissions reduction. 麻豆原创鈥檚 ERP-centric approach enables organizations to deliver sustainability outcomes with applications, data, and AI embedded into . With sustainability reporting, data processing, automation, and strategic insights, AI can navigate your business through today鈥檚 climate challenges and ensure tomorrow鈥檚 competitiveness.

Power on, ethically and responsibly

Scaling AI solutions comes with considerable energy and water usage. To ensure net benefit, this needs to be part of return on investment conversations. With robust governance and renewables-backing however, AI is able to reduce more emissions than it generates.

All 麻豆原创 data centers are powered by 100% renewable energy and any emissions from use of third-party AI systems are calculated and included in the company鈥檚 Scope 3 emissions.

Used ethically and responsibly, AI can be the catalyst of your sustainable business transformation. Here are eight ways that businesses use 麻豆原创鈥檚 AI-powered systems to build their sustainable advantage.

Improve efficiency with automation

1. Compliance information processing

The for product compliance, AI-assisted compliance information processing capability can automatically extract compliance information from updated documents and map the information to compliance requirements.

This can reduce costs in product compliance disclosures, reduce penalties and fines in environmental management, and automate processes to reduce the risk of manual errors.

This helps turn a 50-minute task into a five-minute job and reduce processing and evaluation costs by 90%.

2. Declaration image analysis

With the , AI-assisted declaration image analysis capability, you can automatically extract data and information from sustainability declarations regardless of format.

This helps cut review time, eliminate manual error risk, and ensure your reports are ready for required external audits.

Without AI, it takes roughly five minutes to review, extract, and post information from declarations. With AI, it鈥檚 just 20 seconds.

3. Permit management

can read hundreds of pages in seconds, extract the compliance requirements, and propose clear tasks to meet permit requirements.

This AI-assisted capability can save days of permit review and interpretation, remove the need to hire external consultants, and lead up to an 80% reduction in environmental penalties and fines.

Your personal AI carbon consultant

4. Emission factor mapping

奥颈迟丑听, 麻豆原创鈥檚 AI-enhanced solution, users can calculate product and corporate carbon footprints. Where actual supplier emissions data is given, it can retrieve that information from 麻豆原创 Sustainability Data Exchange and other systems. When estimates are required, the solution can automatically find the most accurate emissions factors from databases and map those to products.

Audit-ready emission factor mapping can turn a 10-minute manual task into a two-minute verification.

5. Report generation

In the solution, you can generate comprehensive ESG reports in just a few clicks:

• Automatically generate reports that align with internal sustainability strategies and meet external requirements such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
• Take data collection from a half hour to a half minute and report creation and drafting from 30 hours down to just five hours, all the while eliminating confusion and the risk of manual errors.

6. Carbon emissions analysis 

From reporting on today to planning for tomorrow, , 麻豆原创鈥檚 copilot, can take current carbon emissions data and return actionable insights that help reduce emissions and guide corporate sustainability strategies. 

By combining financial and carbon data, Joule can create carbon intensity KPIs and can be your ultimate corporate sustainability consultant.

The AI safety officer for your EHS team

7. Safety observation reporting

Complex safety reporting procedures dissuade employees from reporting potential hazards. With the 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, EHS workplace safety, AI-assisted safety observation reporting capability, basic users can input safety observations in natural language, and the AI model can process that into a formal incident report, prompting the user for any missing details.

This can increase the likelihood that employees report safety hazards and helps prevent severe incidents by identifying potential safety issues in advance.

8. Safety instruction generation

Your AI safety officer can generate clear safety instructions for specific equipment based on the latest risk assessments and job hazard analyses.

With 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, EHS workplace safety, AI-assisted safety instruction generation, the time and effort of manually prescribing and updating safety instructions can be dramatically reduced.

Solve today鈥檚 sustainability challenges while preparing for tomorrow

The right AI integration can ensure you future-proof your operations while shining a light on the path that drives competitiveness.

What sets 麻豆原创 apart is our suite-first, AI-first approach that helps ensure sustainability isn鈥檛 an add-on, but a strategic enabler that can deliver measurable outcomes at scale. 麻豆原创鈥檚 one sustainability data model can drive consistent reporting, deeper insight, and confident decisions across every sustainability process, product, and partner network.

With a responsible AI partner, businesses can realize measurable financial returns on AI investments and unlock sustainability benefits; automate manual-heavy paperwork; identify emissions hot spots and steer their business toward a decarbonized economy; and make environmental impact tracking visible to all lines of business based on a reliable single source of truth. With an integrated set of capabilities, solutions help businesses address their sustainability needs holistically and across topics. The result is speed, trust, and traceability, which turn sustainability into strategy, not just compliance.

Get in touch to find out how 麻豆原创 can help your business power on with sustainability solutions.

Monica Molesag is global head of Sustainability Communications at 麻豆原创.

The divide between the digital skills young people possess and the needs of employers is a big challenge and contributes to a high youth unemployment rate, particularly in the Global South. The 麻豆原创 Educate to Employ initiative is set up as a digital pathway through Youth Agency Marketplace (YOMA), a public-private-youth ecosystem from UNICEF鈥檚 Generation Unlimited. The program aims to address this challenge and enable young people鈥檚 skills for a digital economy.

Nearly 90 percent of the 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24 in the world today, are in low-and middle-income countries. An estimated 22 percent do not have jobs and are not in education or training.

Globally, young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. Edmond Shange is one of the many young people who have faced difficulties navigating the employment market right out of high school. 鈥淚n South Africa there’s not a lot of opportunities when it comes to the employment sector,鈥� the 27-year-old shared.

Making copies of a CV or resume and going to a potential employer to drop them off costs money, something in very short supply among South Africa鈥檚 unemployed youth. Despite this, Shange says that as many as 300 young people often queue up to drop off their CVs at a potential employer. 鈥淚 faced a lot of challenges trying to apply for jobs,鈥� he said. “It’s very tough for young people like me.鈥�

Shange is not alone. 鈥淚n Africa over 70 percent of the population are young people and another 4 million join the job market every single year competing for less than half a million new jobs,鈥� said Nadi Albino, deputy director at UNICEF鈥檚 Generation Unlimited.

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Youth unemployment and the lack of digital skills are a global problem, though it’s particularly acute among those who live in the Global South. While the fast-changing global economy demands increasingly specialized expertise, many young people are not learning the skills they need to get these jobs.  

The search for virtual upskilling to improve his digital skills led Shange to the Youth Agency Marketplace (YOMA), a public-private-youth ecosystem supported by UNICEF鈥檚 Generational Unlimited, which offers opportunities for young people to learn, earn, and create impact. On his pathway to employment, Shange was introduced to 麻豆原创 Educate to Employ, an initiative delivered to YOMA through the implementing partner Umuzi. The curriculum for 麻豆原创 Educate to Employ involves 700 hours of targeted training focused on building soft skills and technical expertise.

After completing the course, Shange feels much more confident with his skills. As a result, he has recently secured an internship as a software developer at a startup gaming company based at Wits University Tshimologong Precinct.

Whether young people are educated, trained, or employed has significant implications for their overall well-being and ability to promote future economic growth, development, and sociopolitical stability. Unfortunately, most traditional education systems do not address the emerging youth digital skills gap.

This realization was one of the driving forces behind the creation of 麻豆原创 Educate to Employ.

鈥溌槎乖� Educate to Employ was created to support young people who are neither in education nor employment, providing them with training, certification, and guidance to access roles within the 麻豆原创 ecosystem,鈥� explained Eugene Ho who leads 麻豆原创鈥檚 global CSR flagship skilling programs targeted at youths in need. 鈥淭hrough its tailored curriculum, the initiative has successfully helped candidates with only high-school qualifications.鈥�

鈥淭he 麻豆原创 Educate to Employ initiative provides young people with the tools, skills, and resources that they need to get employed or to employ,鈥� Albino added in an interview with 麻豆原创. 鈥淲e have to go back to making sure that these education systems work and that they work in tandem with where the world is going.鈥�

To meet industry needs, 麻豆原创 Educate to Employ curricula has been designed for three critical roles within the 麻豆原创 ecosystem: consultant associate, developer associate, and support associate. The curriculum taps into educational content from industry-leading organizations such as Coursera, Accenture, EY, and 麻豆原创 Learning.  

麻豆原创 CEO Christian Klein is the chair of the Generation Unlimited Board.  

鈥淭he YOMA online platform alone has had over 600,000 registrations,” Albino confirmed. “A measure of success is how the ecosystem has enabled over 5 million opportunities to learn, earn, and create impact worldwide in the past two years. We are now beginning to see young people getting into jobs.鈥�

Shange鈥檚 journey with YOMA and 麻豆原创 Educate to Employ started in the living room of his grandmother’s house, a place where community has always taken center stage. 鈥淚 look up to my grandmother; she has done a lot for the community,” he said. “I hope that I could do the same — help people in the tech field create more jobs for people that are in need and just be creative.鈥�

A permanent full-time job would enable Shange to feed and look after his family, and to continue helping others in his community the same way he was helped. In his community, Shange says he is seen as something of a role model.

鈥淚 want young people to know that it’s possible [to get a job],” he said. “Keep applying and also don’t lose hope when you see something’s not working. Some things do take time, so give it your best and make sure that you see it through.鈥�

Today, 麻豆原创 extended its founding partnership with Generation Unlimited for four more years, 2026-2029, with a commitment of US$2 million.

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Yet a curious trend has emerged: many companies are pursuing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals more discreetly, a phenomenon known as 鈥済reen-hushing.鈥� In fact, found that while some companies have pulled back, about 84% are either maintaining or strengthening their climate commitments, even as they become less vocal about them. This demonstrates that despite shifting political winds, businesses recognize that sustainability initiatives remain fundamentally good for business.

A comprehensive and conducted by Economist Impact confirms this shifting landscape, revealing growing confidence in procurement鈥檚 capacity to deliver on ESG performance indicators. While risk factors are rising, so is readiness鈥攁 shift that is especially encouraging for procurement executives overseeing ESG performance. The data shows approximately 90% of respondents report strong internal collaboration between procurement and other departments, up from 75% last year.

The external picture is equally promising: over 90% of executives report that deeper supplier partnerships are yielding benefits, particularly in driving innovation and sustainability outcomes. For procurement leaders, the data tells a clear story: collaboration may be the new currency of success.

Collaboration: The silent engine of progress

Procurement鈥檚 strategic influence is expanding through tighter integration with internal stakeholders. As teams become more embedded across business functions, they鈥檙e unlocking new value through improved orchestration and proactive planning. Specialized business partner groups that bridge strategy and execution are helping meet cross-functional needs.

This enhanced collaboration has yielded key benefits, including cost savings (74%) and improved digital adoption (61%). However, a gap remains between these immediate gains and longer-term value drivers like innovation and agility. As procurement operations continue to digitize, talent development must adapt. AI proficiency and ethical technology have emerged as the top skill priorities for procurement hires over the next 12-18 months (68%), followed by sustainability expertise (55%).

Enabled by digital tools that deliver 鈥�360-degree visibility,鈥� procurement executives are seeing alignment between category strategies and broader enterprise objectives, helping them spot risks, understand market shifts, and manage supplier performance more effectively.

Supplier partnerships: Accelerating ESG progress and innovation

Forward-thinking procurement organizations are now partnering with suppliers to introduce solutions like recyclable packaging, greener materials, and low-emission logistics. These collaborations are accelerating decarbonization efforts while helping future-proof supply chains.

Despite decreased governmental prioritization of sustainability in some regions, smart companies continue pursuing ESG goals when they align with business objectives. Nearly half (48%) of executives report improved sustainability performance from closer supplier ties, and 38% cite more supplier-driven innovation.

Many procurement teams are navigating uncertainty around their ESG approach, questioning whether to lead sustainability initiatives boldly or keep their efforts under the radar amid regulatory shifts. Regardless of this strategic tension, the value of supplier collaboration remains undeniable, particularly as these efforts often improve operational efficiency and reduce costs.

Procurement can strengthen this momentum by investing in platforms that track emissions, monitor regulatory developments, and support compliance. Many organizations are expanding efforts to address Scope 3 emissions鈥攖ypically the most challenging to measure鈥攚ith increasing sophistication around supplier data collection and performance expectations. This shift reflects increased accountability across the value chain and reinforces procurement鈥檚 pivotal role in advancing ESG objectives.    

While public sentiment and political consensus may fluctuate, regulators continue to advance mandatory disclosure requirements and climate accountability measures. Preparation is especially urgent as new policies鈥攆rom the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive to Germany鈥檚 Supply Chain Due Diligence Act鈥攊mpose stricter requirements on businesses.

Even if some regulations face delays or deprioritization, they are not disappearing. Organizations that act now will be best positioned to lead when enforcement inevitably intensifies.

Meeting elevated standards through supplier collaboration

The evolution of procurement鈥檚 influence rests on one fundamental capability: collaboration.

Internally, effective collaboration drives digital adoption, reduces costs, and breaks down organizational silos. Externally, it powers sustainability initiatives and fosters innovation. Without it, even the most sophisticated ESG strategies risk faltering. Poorly structured collaboration leads to critical data gaps, duplicated effort, and supplier fatigue. Today鈥檚 procurement executives must ensure their ESG and risk management approaches don鈥檛 overburden suppliers, or they risk disengagement precisely when long-term innovation is needed most.

Increased collaboration is consistently cited as the primary driver of accelerated ESG progress. Maintaining this momentum requires balance: bold action tempered by operational pragmatism, and clear expectations paired with tools that support supplier compliance and success.

Procurement鈥檚 moment of opportunity

Procurement is uniquely positioned to translate sustainability ambitions into measurable, scalable outcomes. By fostering collaboration across business units and with suppliers, it can shape the future of responsible business.

Even when ESG ambitions are pursued discreetly, the business case for action remains compelling鈥攂oth for organizational performance and broader societal benefit. Companies that maintain sustainability initiatives despite changing political priorities position themselves advantageously for the future while capturing immediate operational benefits. Procurement鈥檚 ability to embed sustainability considerations into core decisions consistently and collaboratively will define its impact in the years ahead.

solutions can integrate seamlessly with and to help businesses better track, manage, and reduce their environmental impact across the supply chain. These solutions can enable organizations to incorporate sustainability metrics into procurement decisions, improve transparency with trading partners, and help ensure compliance with evolving environmental regulations.

Many of the insights above were explored during the following Economist Impact webinar, 鈥淢easuring up: Balancing risks and goals for strategic procurement.鈥� To delve further into these topics and hear expert perspectives, . For those eager to continue the conversation and engage directly with leaders in the field, the upcoming 麻豆原创 Connect event鈥擮ctober 6-8 in Las Vegas, Nevada鈥攐ffers an excellent opportunity to join on-site and gain deeper insights into strategic procurement, ESG initiatives, and innovation. .

Baber Farooq is senior vice president and head of Market Strategy for 麻豆原创 Ariba.

Q: How does 麻豆原创 view sustainability within its overall business strategy?

A: Sustainability is a core element of business strategy and deeply embedded in our vision to help the world run better and improve people鈥檚 lives. This means it is not a separate initiative, but an integral part of our leadership and long-term goals as a company. And as such, sustainability is a business catalyst and value driver.

What does 麻豆原创鈥檚 commitment to reach net-zero GHG emissions by 2030 mean in practice?

We recognize that with a customer base that generates 84 percent of the total global commerce, we have the responsibility and opportunity to lead in corporate climate action efforts. This isn鈥檛 just about reporting numbers; it鈥檚 a science-based transformation that is embedded in our operations, collaboration with suppliers, technology, and what we offer to our customers.

For us, it means our strategy aligns with the 1.5掳C pathway set in the Paris Agreement. We aim to reduce gross GHG emissions by 90 percent across our relevant value chain (market-based). The remaining emissions 鈥� no more than 10 percent 鈥� will be neutralized through high-quality, verified carbon removal projects. Our reduction efforts have earned 麻豆原创鈥檚 inclusion in the EU Paris-Aligned Benchmarks, which gives climate-conscious investors confidence in our approach.

What does 麻豆原创鈥檚 decarbonization strategy consist of?

Our transformation is structured around four interconnected pillars:

With cloud transformation, we鈥檙e accelerating the shift from on-premise to cloud solutions, with 麻豆原创-managed data centers already powered by 100 percent renewable electricity. In parallel, we are collaborating with hyperscalers and our customers to push renewable electricity adoption upstream and downstream. An important part of this transition is enhancing GHG accounting and moving from estimates to primary data from our suppliers.

With upstream supply chain engagement, we are revising procurement policies and working closely with our suppliers to lower emissions across the supply chain. This includes aligning on data transparency and decarbonization targets. The rise of energy-intensive technologies like AI presents new challenges, but we鈥檙e addressing them through joint commitments and shared accountability.

In internal operations, we have several initiatives in place. For instance, since 2014 麻豆原创 has been running all offices, owned data centers, and co-locations on 100 percent renewable electricity. In addition to this, we are electrifying our vehicle fleet, and we have an internal carbon pricing scheme for business flights in place. The generated funds are invested in projects that have a positive impact on local and global populations as well as climate and biodiversity.

To neutralize 麻豆原创’s residual emissions that remain beyond聽2030 after all feasible reduction efforts, we are investing in high-integrity carbon removals, ranging from nature-based to engineered solutions. Great examples of this are聽our long-term investments in the Livelihoods Carbon Funds and聽Climeworks’ Direct Air Capture solutions.聽The partnership with Climeworks聽marks a significant milestone for 麻豆原创 and our commitment to durable carbon removals. Additionally, we make聽annual contributions聽to climate finance. The voluntary investments made during our transition to net-zero allow us to take responsibility for our emissions, increase our聽overall impact聽beyond our聽own decarbonization efforts, and help the world keep their climate targets聽in reach.

Where does the fit into your strategy?

We have entered an agreement with Climeworks to secure 37,000 tons of high-quality carbon removal credits through 2034. This includes technologies like direct air capture, biochar, and enhanced rock weathering. More than just a carbon removal purchase, this is a strategic innovation partnership.

Together, we are co-creating ERP-centric carbon management tools, integrated into solutions like 麻豆原创 Sustainability Control Tower, and making it available via 麻豆原创 Store. These tools will help companies manage and mitigate emissions in real time, making carbon removal more actionable at scale.

Is Climeworks also adopting 麻豆原创 solutions?

Yes, and that is part of what makes this partnership so compelling. Climeworks has implemented 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Public Cloud through the GROW with 麻豆原创 journey and is using the 麻豆原创 LeanIX portfolio to support its rapid growth. These tools help with compliance, financial management, and operational efficiency — all critical elements for scaling in the climate-tech space.

How does this alliance benefit 麻豆原创鈥檚 business and customers?

It is a strategic move that strengthens our position economically and environmentally. As 麻豆原创 Chief Sustainability & Commercial Officer Sophia Mendelsohn recently shared, this partnership allows us to lock in carbon removal capacity at preferred rates, hedging against future price volatility. But more importantly, it enables us to create new sustainability-focused solutions for our customers, helping them meet regulatory and stakeholder expectations.

As 麻豆原创 pushes ahead with its decarbonization strategy, where do you see the biggest opportunities for positive impact, both within 麻豆原创 and for the broader ecosystem?

As 麻豆原创 advances its decarbonization strategy, the biggest opportunities for positive impact lie in leveraging our technology and ecosystem to drive systemic change — both internally and across industries.

Within 麻豆原创, our greatest opportunity is embedding sustainability directly into core business processes — such as procurement, supply chain, and finance — using our own solutions. This not only reduces our operational GHG footprint but serves as a model for our customers. Our sustainability solutions aim to empower organizations to measure, manage, and act on their sustainability goals. By doing so, we scale our impact.

We remain grounded in the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) Corporate Net-Zero Standard and see opportunities to lead by example, even beyond 2030, by continuously improving our net-zero program and sharing best practices.

In the end, we are not just preparing for a net-zero future; we are shaping it. Through collaboration, transparency, and technology, we are proving that climate action is essential to long-term success.

Karen Restrepo Avila is Sustainability and Net-Zero communications lead at 麻豆原创.

In recent years, amid the evolving regulatory landscape and interdependencies with other business areas, a new set of cross-process requirements have surfaced.

麻豆原创鈥檚 answer is the shift from a reactive, centralized compliance management system to a proactive approach that adapts to an organization’s needs. We are transforming 麻豆原创 Environment, Health, and Safety Management from a monolithic system of record into a modular and connected suite.

Environmental management: from static tracking to intelligence

麻豆原创 solutions for environmental management address the management of waste and emissions as well as water and wastewater.

Updates to EHS solutions are intended to assist users in completing tasks more quickly and efficiently. For example, intelligent permit management is possible thanks to automated regulatory requirement extraction, making permit management tasks less tedious. In the future, proactive regulatory intelligence will prepare customers for the impacts of changing compliance requirements.

By focusing on proactive document extraction and a single entry point for compliance, customers can expect to benefit from reduced compliance preparation time and enhanced audit readiness.

Workplace safety management: from reactive to proactive

The updated workplace safety process orchestrates and extends the individual capabilities of safety performance management, operational risk management, and incident management.

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Recent and upcoming updates leverage AI and increase usability to support safety instruction, reporting, and performance tracking 鈥� enhancing customers鈥� productivity and ability to demonstrate EHS value to stakeholders. More and better documented safety observation enable faster risk prioritization and preventive action, leading to fewer near-misses and incidents.聽

Capabilities include:

• Integrated risk assessments that connect hazard identification directly to operational controls and safety protocols
• AI-assisted safety instruction generation that equips teams with relevant information about hazards to health or environment and protective measures to prevent malfunctions, accidents, or emergencies
• Performance analytics that use real-time safety data to provide proactive insights for continuous safety improvement

By streamlining or automating manually intensive tasks like risk assessment and instruction document creation, your team can reduce time spent by as much as 65 to 70 percent, freeing them to focus on what matters. In addition to time savings, AI has the potential to reduce incidents and near misses by using simple and inclusive language in the instructions that reduces misconceptions by the executing workers.

Our EHS architecture evolution: from system of record to active, modular suite

Short-term, incremental improvements cannot meet the demands of modern EHS needs. 麻豆原创鈥檚 vision for EHS transformation will take us from the reactive to proactive, and eventually predictive by leveraging AI integrations. These solutions will give customers the competitive advantage in regulatory responsiveness and operational efficiency.

Find more insights from 麻豆原创鈥檚 recent the and the

Gunther Rothermel is chief product officer for 麻豆原创 Sustainability.

This year鈥檚 London Climate Action Week was less about reaffirming action, and more about accelerating it. Now in its seventh year, this is Europe鈥檚 largest city-wide climate event, bringing together policymakers, investors, NGOs, and technologists to accelerate plans ahead of COP30 in鈥疊el茅m, Brazil. Three major themes stood out across the week.

1. Decarbonize and build resilience

Business leaders and policymakers are focused on scaling decarbonization while also confronting the reality of escalating physical risks. From industrial heat to infrastructure retrofits, the message was clear: climate disruption is now a core business risk. As resilience is becoming synonymous with competitiveness, organizations are embedding climate data into board decisions and using it to guide strategy.

This shift is urgent: climate-driven losses are no longer theoretical, and businesses should treat physical risk with the same granularity and urgency as margin forecasting.

麻豆原创 has focused on turning physical climate risk into actionable intelligence for customers. By integrating sustainability metrics with financial models, companies can frame adaptation investments as cost-avoidance with measurable return on investment.

2. Mobilize climate finance

The gap between climate capital and real-economy transformation remains wide, especially in emerging markets. But momentum is building. London鈥檚 mayor announced a new climate finance task force aimed at crowding in public-private investment, while investors discussed blended finance models and sustainability-linked instruments. To stay investable, companies must present decision-grade sustainability data and show credible transition plans.

麻豆原创 is working with customers to bridge the divide between macro-level climate finance signals and operational decisions. That means using our systems to unify environmental data with financial and risk metrics, so sustainability reporting isn鈥檛 just about compliance, but about surfacing value. With green bonds and adaptation finance accelerating, businesses that can connect site-specific risk to capital expenditure planning will be best placed to access new funding streams.

We鈥檙e helping customers uncover the hidden costs of climate disruption — whether that鈥檚 increased cooling, transport volatility, or water constraints — and link them to balance sheet impacts. The result is a stronger business case for resilience investments, and more relevant data for financial partners.

3. Digital innovation and AI

A wave of sessions focused on the power of digital tools to accelerate climate action. 麻豆原创 and fellow sustainability leaders highlighted how AI is enabling everything from emissions forecasting to supply chain optimization, while digital twins are helping companies and cities simulate disruption, model trade-offs, and optimize resources in real time.

Central to this story is responsible AI. At London Climate Action Week, SustainableIT.org recognized 麻豆原创 with the Responsible AI Impact Award for its cross-functional work to embed ethical, human-centered AI into enterprise systems, driving outcomes that are not only efficient, but also equitable and sustainable.

This approach is guided by 麻豆原创鈥檚 Global AI Ethics Policy, which is grounded in the UNESCO recommendations on the Ethics of AI, and shapes how we build and deliver AI across all our sustainability and business solutions.

At 麻豆原创, we鈥檙e designing AI to assist, not replace, human activity — to scale climate action with integrity. We are focused on delivering embedded business AI tools that turn complexity into clarity, while preserving transparency and auditability.

Applying 麻豆原创鈥檚 tech lens: from insight to impact

London Climate Action Week 2025 made one truth unavoidable: climate leadership now hinges on trusted data and innovative technology, including human-centred AI. Across sessions, AI and unified data were repeatedly cited as the accelerants of climate progress, whether mapping Scope鈥�3 emissions or modelling extreme weather scenarios.

Drawing on these insights, businesses can look to three main areas to boost their sustainability efforts:

• Make sustainability data first-class business data: posts auditable carbon and financial entries side by side, turning emissions into actionable profit and loss drivers. When linked with site-level climate risk data, 麻豆原创 Green Ledger allows businesses to understand the cost of disruption — from heatwaves to resource scarcity — and align sustainability with enterprise planning.
• Augment teams with responsible AI: With , AI-assisted declaration image analysis automates thousands of supplier documents; with , AI-assisted emission factor mapping links thousands of materials to high-quality emission factors in minutes. In , AI now also supports environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report generation, using best-practice templates to draft audit-ready reports, complete with data visualizations. This frees up sustainability teams to focus on strategy while increasing speed, accuracy, and regulatory confidence.
• Unify processes, finance, and sustainability in the cloud: 麻豆原创 Sustainability Control鈥疶ower will become an intelligent application within later this year, which will unify sustainability data and business operations on a single platform, enabling consistent reporting, deeper insight, and smarter decision-making across the enterprise.

By breaking down silos among sustainability, finance, procurement, and operations, 麻豆原创 is enabling businesses to act faster on everything from climate disclosure to adaptation investment. When ESG data is managed like financial data — with rigor, governance, and relevance — it becomes a strategic asset.

Together, these capabilities turn the rallying cry of London Climate Action Week 2025 鈥渇rom morality to materiality鈥� into a practical playbook: embed sustainability where business happens and use responsible AI to scale impact without compromise. From emissions to adaptation to finance, the future of climate leadership is not just digital, it鈥檚 enterprise-deep.

Monica Molesag is global head of Sustainability Communications at 麻豆原创.

Sustainability is an essential element of 麻豆原创鈥檚 purpose to help the world run better and improve people鈥檚 lives. Our approach is grounded in creating positive economic, social, and environmental impact, always within the limits of planetary boundaries and in full respect of human rights. With the ambition to drive sustainability beyond our net-zero 2030 goals and a portfolio that supports broader action areas such as holistic steering and reporting, ethical business conduct, and social responsibility, it was a natural progression for 麻豆原创 to become its own customer.

As both an and enabler, we aim to make our targets and purpose a reality. At the same time, by testing our IT solutions to the limit, we share the lessons learned along the way with the product development teams to continuously improve the 麻豆原创 Sustainability portfolio.

麻豆原创 shares its clients鈥� challenges

麻豆原创 faces many of the same sustainability challenges as our customers, such as data collection, data management, and compliance with regulatory requirements. Like the many organizations we support, 麻豆原创 must manage huge volumes of sustainability data, including carbon footprints, material flows, and ESG metrics, working to ensure accuracy, consistency, and accessibility across the value chain. Demands on IT systems are high. They must grapple with collecting, integrating, and sharing data while also assuring quality, traceability, and auditability.

The evolving regulatory landscape represents another challenge, requiring 麻豆原创 and other organizations to adapt and leverage their systems for compliance and reporting. IT solutions must be scaled and adjusted rapidly to these changing regulations and be able to collaborate seamlessly with supply chain partners.

Beyond these requirements, companies need sustainability data to provide actionable insights to support decision-making and respond to stakeholders. Meeting these challenges head-on requires an IT infrastructure that is innovative, scalable, and designed to evolve as the business advances on its sustainability journey.

鈥溌槎乖� runs 麻豆原创鈥� implementation

In practice, 麻豆原创鈥檚 systems are designed to empower customers to measure, report, and act on their sustainability goals. To enable this, solutions are built into core business systems such as and (麻豆原创 BTP). This helps ensure a solid data foundation and flexible integration of data sets from various business areas such as procurement, finance, supply chain management, and product design. Sustainability-focused tools like , , and can then provide the data, analytics, and insights needed to help drive sustainable decision-making.

“By implementing 麻豆原创 Sustainability Control Tower and 麻豆原创 Green Ledger across our reporting ecosystem, we aim to elevate sustainability management to the same standard as financial reporting,鈥� said Dr. Christopher Sessar, Chief Accounting Officer, 麻豆原创 SE. 鈥淭hese powerful tools will not only streamline and automate our ESG regulative compliance efforts but also generate actionable insights that drive strategic decision-making, accelerating our journey toward measurable sustainability outcomes and long-term environmental value creation.”

Implementation lessons

麻豆原创鈥檚 approach has evolved since the first implementation of 麻豆原创 Sustainability Control Tower in 2022. Early lessons included the need to collect emissions data in a consistent manner, anchor the project in its net-zero program governance, and expand the scope of the project beyond carbon footprint data to include other environmental topics for a more holistic approach.

The next question concerned the IT architecture, organized into three layers. The top layer relates to the collection of raw sustainability, financial, and operational data from various source systems. The middle management layer processes and standardizes the data. Finally, a bottom planning and reporting layer delivers insights for sustainability decision-making.

The rollout began by uploading carbon footprint data into 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management across one company code and will increase to five company codes before the system goes live in Q3 of this year. It is useful to note the iterative approach our team has taken, which has allowed for the collection and integration of data from different sources and the testing of use cases including our聽ability to support businesses amid changes such as those recently initiated by the EU鈥檚 new Omnibus package.

Matthias Medert is global head of Sustainability at 麻豆原创 SE.

This data-granular, verifiable, one-click solution supports the company on its path to carbon neutrality by 2030.

Challenges and opportunities

HARTING faced the challenge of finding a reliable method to calculate CO鈧� emissions across thousands of production materials while meeting customer and supplier expectations regarding sustainability. Leveraging its existing ERP application landscape with 麻豆原创 and maintaining established green production and renewable energy processes were crucial.

鈥淐onducting our business and protecting the environment are not mutually exclusive. We are convinced that we must consider both to be successful in the long run,鈥� says Dietmar Harting, member of the Board and partner of the HARTING Technology Group.

Innovations for a sustainable future

Considered the connectivity gold standard across various industrial sectors, HARTING required a robust system to accurately assess emissions. can automate data collection, scale emission calculations, and create CO鈧� transparency throughout the supply chain. 鈥淭he key to communicating our CO鈧� emissions transparently and recognizing potential for reduction lies in the automated calculation and granularity of the data provided by 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management,鈥� explains Dr. Stephan Middelkamp, general manager, Quality and Technology at HARTING.

This solution enables HARTING to provide real-time, granular data to support the 鈥淕reenLine鈥� label, an environmentally sustainable designation highlighting renewable materials offering up to a 70% CO鈧� reduction.

Strengthening sustainable production

With 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management, HARTING can now precisely calculate and report product carbon footprints. This capability is essential to address upcoming EU sustainability regulations, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and Digital Product Passport. The solution helps simplify complex data into verifiable, one-click results, promoting sustainable production practices.

Also integrated into HARTING’s sustainability strategy is the use of , which helps the company design products responsibly from the start, reduce plastic taxes, and promote recycling.

鈥淭he site-level data derived from 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management will drive cleaner production in environmentally friendly facilities while mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the impact on water and land life. Green is how we think, green is how we act,鈥� emphasizes Jordy Brinks, global environmental manager at HARTING.

On the path to a greener future

麻豆原创 is advancing HARTING鈥檚 sustainability journey by enabling the company to design products more sustainably, reduce plastic taxes, promote responsible sourcing, and further recycling practices. With these efforts, HARTING aims to achieve carbon neutrality at all locations by 2030, underscoring its commitment to sustainable growth and environmental stewardship.

“As a family business, we combine consistency with a willingness to innovate and regional loyalty. For us, this means taking responsibility for people and the environment,鈥� Harting says. 鈥淲e鈥檙e not only shaping a livable planet for our future generations, we鈥檙e making the future possible. We want to shape the future with technologies for people.鈥�

The HARTING Technology Group continues to drive meaningful change, connecting business success with a greener future and aligning family ideals with sustainability goals.

HARTING at the 2025 麻豆原创 Innovation Awards

All of these efforts did not go unnoticed: HARTING has long been recognized as a pioneer in sustainability. This year, it won an , leveraging 麻豆原创 Responsible Design and Production to create 85% of its plastic packaging material from recycled materials.

This article first appeared on the German 麻豆原创 News Center.

By embedding sustainability into core business applications, unifying fragmented data across the enterprise, and amplifying human expertise through AI, 麻豆原创 is transforming how organizations turn sustainability commitments into competitive advantage.

Across the C-suite, leaders face pressure to make good on their organizations鈥� sustainability commitments while ensuring these initiatives create tangible value for their specific business units and departmental operations.

COOs grapple with maintaining resilient supply chains while embedding sustainability metrics for better risk prediction. CFOs struggle to gain visibility into integrated financial and non-financial data needed to manage reporting and drive sustainable growth. CPOs seek transparency of suppliers鈥� sustainability footprints across the source-to-pay process, while CHROs work to engage talent with authentic sustainability performance. Meanwhile, CROs need verified sustainability data to build brand trust and enable green premium pricing, and CIOs face the complex challenge of integrating sustainability data while managing governance, cost, and AI-driven innovation.

What鈥檚 missing is not awareness, but actionable, decision-grade sustainability data worthy of sitting alongside financial and operational metrics. This is why we build sustainability directly into our applications, generating new, usable data at the source of business activity.

Organizations find themselves constrained by financial systems, inconsistent data, and business processes that were not designed to address sustainability鈥檚 multifaceted nature. By ensuring this sustainability data becomes part of customers鈥� larger data story and drives core processes, we overcome these constraints.

This isn鈥檛 a peripheral issue; sustainability now intersects every critical business function, and the thoughtful organization of sustainability data. Its application to business processes prepares organizations for their agentic AI future, where sustainability metrics contribute to broader business intelligence tools like margin optimization agents rather than being siloed in sustainability-only solutions.

In this environment, 麻豆原创 emerges as a strategic partner that combines sustainability data with business processes to drive real change. By harnessing the power of 麻豆原创 Business AI and 麻豆原创 Business Data Cloud, we translate intricate sustainability challenges into clear, executable strategies.

This week, we introduced a new evolutionary step of sustainability solutions that go beyond traditional software updates. These solutions are designed to bridge the critical gap between organizational ambition and tangible outcomes. We help businesses manage risk, ensure compliance, and unlock meaningful enterprise-wide value.

This is more than a technological upgrade; it’s a strategic framework for sustainable business innovation. And now, we’re translating that strategy into action, through AI-powered innovations that scale.

AI for sustainability at scale: New innovations for EHS and product compliance

Beginning in August 2025, new capabilities will be available in beta, embedded within key sustainability applications to help customers ready their data, automate processes, and amplify their expertise. These AI-driven innovations streamline operations across environmental, health and safety (EHS) and product compliance workflows, driving measurable and scalable impact.

Here鈥檚 a look at what鈥檚 coming:

• AI-assisted permit management in 麻豆原创 S/4HANA for EHS environment management simplifies and automates permit handling by capturing and extracting key data from permit documents and automatically proposing relevant follow-up tasks to ensure compliance.
• AI-assisted safety observation reporting with , 麻豆原创鈥檚 AI copilot, in , enables seamless, intuitive incident reporting through a conversational interface, reducing barriers to shop floor safety documentation.
• AI-assisted safety instruction generation in 麻豆原创 S/4HANA for EHS workplace safety suggests appropriate safety instructions based on risk assessments and job hazard analyses, supporting proactive and preventive measures.
• AI-assisted compliance information processing in 麻豆原创 S/4HANA for product compliance automates the extraction and mapping of critical data from declarations, certificates, and safety data sheets, improving accuracy and freeing teams from tedious manual work.

These features will be available in beta and will be part of the new , reflecting 麻豆原创鈥檚 commitment to delivering embedded, business-ready AI that drives real outcomes.

AI that鈥檚 already delivering value

麻豆原创 customers are already leveraging Business AI to supercharge their sustainability efforts, including:

• In , AI accelerates environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report generation with editable templates, generative text, and visualizations, freeing teams to focus on ESG execution, not formatting.
• In , AI automates emission factor mapping by intelligently matching products to thousands of lifecycle assessment database entries, complete with confidence scores.
• In , AI automatically validating and extracting data from International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC) PLUS supplier declarations, minimizing errors and increasing speed.

These intelligent capabilities help customers reduce costs, mitigate risk, and drive business performance across reporting, carbon management, circularity, and regulatory compliance.

What鈥檚 next: unlocking enterprise-wide sustainability insights

In the second half of 2025, 麻豆原创 will make 麻豆原创 Sustainability Control Tower available as an Intelligent Application within . This will unify sustainability data and business operations on a single platform, enabling consistent reporting, deeper insight, and smarter decision-making across the enterprise.

A technology preview of these solutions will be made available to selected customers before general availability.

One sustainability data model: From complexity to clarity

麻豆原创 is also introducing new sustainability data products throughout 2025 as part of our strategy to deliver hundreds of curated and governed datasets across . These data products, accessible via 麻豆原创 Business Data Cloud, will include:

• Structured emissions data (air, water, wastewater) from 麻豆原创 EHS Management and 麻豆原创 S/4HANA for product compliance
• Additional datasets from 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management

This unified sustainability data model will empower customers to strengthen compliance, simplify analytics, and scale sustainability programs with confidence and clarity.

Process intelligence meets sustainability intelligence

True progress does not just come from better data, it comes from better processes. That is why 麻豆原创 is embedding sustainability impact metrics into the starting in autumn 2025. These new capabilities will include:

• 麻豆原创 Signavio Value Accelerators: Pre-built process models and industry best practices tailored for regulatory-specific use cases
• 麻豆原创 Signavio Process Intelligence: Analytics tools that identify opportunities to optimize business processes and embed sustainability at scale

With these additions, customers can align process transformation efforts with environmental goals, helping close the gap between strategy and execution.

Your best, made real

With 麻豆原创, transforms from a compliance checklist into a lever for innovation, resilience, and growth. By embedding sustainability into applications, unifying data across the enterprise, and enabling intelligent automation through AI, we empower organizations to be sustainable while accelerating performance.

From frontline safety to carbon reporting, from real-time data to boardroom insights, this is what 鈥測our best, made real鈥� looks like.

Welcome to a new era of sustainable enterprise management, powered by 麻豆原创.

Sophia Mendelsohn is chief sustainability and commercial officer at 麻豆原创.
Gunther Rothermel is chief product officer for 麻豆原创 Sustainability.

Or, more specifically, to celebrate the astonishing beauty of the planet we share and to leverage an opportunity to inspire individual action to ensure a livable, thriving world for everyone.

, themed 鈥淥ur Power, Our Planet,鈥� was a reminder of the unique role we can each play in building a more sustainable future. While not everyone may feel an immediate connection to the topic of climate action 鈥� other social issues may more deeply influence the choices we make and the actions we take to leave our mark on the world 鈥� it is clear that the health of the planet has an effect on every aspect of life, from the economy to our everyday well-being.

Employees at 麻豆原创 are encouraged to bring their best, whole selves to work. One program making this possible is the Acceleration Collective. The Acceleration Collective is a virtual pro bono consulting program delivered with 麻豆原创 social impact partner MovingWorlds on the . The program pairs employees with social enterprises 鈥� for example, impact-led organizations prioritizing people and planet over profit 鈥� to help solve business challenges that organizations are experiencing.聽

Pro bono consulting for people- and planet-first companies offers employees the chance to explore what is possible at the intersection of their professional experiences and their personal values. Not only does the Acceleration Collective allow employees to influence solutions to problems they see in the world, it also allows them to gain new expertise in a practical way, especially in areas like sustainability.

In honor of Earth Day, we are sharing stories of mutual learning and leadership development from pro bono engagements that have empowered 麻豆原创 employees to partner with impact businesses focused on advancing sustainable practices and driving meaningful change for the world.

Alliance of learning and leadership

Late last year, Youssef Zekhnini, a Customer Success Manager in the Netherlands, took on a project working on a team of employees and representatives from . A circular social enterprise that helps the environment by diverting textiles from landfill and upcycling them into luxury goods, CycleUp also empowers marginalized individuals in rural Ireland through training and skill development in the art of upcycling.

Collaborating with the CycleUp team and engaging with their mission provided Zekhnini with 鈥渧aluable insights into how sustainable business models can positively affect a wide range of people within a community,鈥� and helped him realize 鈥渢hat these models are often more complex than they appear.鈥�

Their work together offered a focused opportunity for Zekhnini to strengthen his leadership skills, which 鈥渞eally highlighted the importance of clear communication, teamwork, and decisiveness,鈥� challenging him 鈥渢o step up, stay focused, and lead collaboratively in order to deliver a meaningful and impactful result.鈥�

In just a few months, Zekhnini was able to gather new learnings about himself and the capacity for leadership that exists inside all of us, and more deeply understand what is possible when businesses are built and run with sustainability at their core.

Journey of insights and impact

For Sydney, Australia-based Jason Luo, an enterprise architect, and Felicity Zare, a Customer Success partner, their work with helped them understand sustainability 鈥渁s both a mindset and a practice鈥� and reframe it as 鈥渁 long-term growth opportunity, not just a compliance topic,鈥� respectively.

In his reflection, Luo shared how the stories of specific families that have benefited from this client鈥檚 mission 鈥渃rystallized the human dimension of sustainability鈥� for him.

鈥淚 realized that ethical practices and community empowerment are not trade-offs but foundational pillars for modern enterprises,鈥� he said. 鈥淪ustainable business models succeed when they are rooted in authentic relationships and local context. Sustainability requires balancing ambition with empathy, innovation with inclusivity, and vision with adaptability — lessons I鈥檒l carry forward in all future endeavors.鈥�

Circular Cities Asia helps to foster circular innovation in Asian cities by building capacity and testing eco-solutions on university campuses through community, mentorship, and hands-on projects. Their 麻豆原创 pro bono team supported them with the prioritization of key customer segments, the development of value proposition canvases, and the design of targeted pitch decks. Beyond these deliverables, 鈥渢he insights, knowledge, and expertise [the 麻豆原创 team] brought to the table were invaluable, allowing us to refine our strategy [and gain] a fresh perspective on how to align our operations with future growth and sustainability goals.鈥�

Zare, who felt an extra special connection to this organization, as she has family from South East Asia, also shared that participating in the Acceleration Collective 鈥渉elped sharpen facilitation skills鈥� and that for her, 鈥渢ranslating our 麻豆原创 knowledge into actionable strategies for a small, impact-driven team was a valuable stretch opportunity and reinforced the need to lead with clarity, empathy, and structure.鈥�

Luo echoed this sentiment, articulating that a key takeaway from his experience was 鈥渢he importance of adaptive communication — translating complex ideas into actionable steps for both our client and my peers.鈥�

Their journey together enabled Circular Cities Asia to focus and amplify their impact and offered their pro bono consultant team from 麻豆原创 the kinds of insights and skill development that will support them as their careers continue to grow inside of 麻豆原创 and beyond.

Through their experiences working with CycleUp Textiles and Circular Cities Asia — social enterprises uniquely focused on shaping the future of sustainability — Zekhnini, Luo, and Zare have done more than just invest in their own growth. They have aligned their careers with their personal values and applied their skills in ways that can leave a lasting impact on the planet.

As environmental degradation and resource depletion continue to pose significant challenges, the world of business needs more leaders who are committed to participating in the creation of real change. These stories can show that pro bono consulting offers a stepping stone to meaningful collaboration and partnership that helps employees not only develop a growth mindset, but also a deeper understanding of what it looks like to drive sustainability from within a business.

As more 麻豆原创 employees across the globe take on the opportunity to work alongside extraordinary, inspiring social entrepreneurs through pro bono consulting, these ripple effects will continue to spread, driving innovation, encouraging collaboration, and empowering future leaders to tackle the most pressing issues of our time.

Erin LaBarge is program lead of Global Employee Engagement Strategy for 麻豆原创 Corporate Social Responsibility at 麻豆原创.

These changes bring vast challenges but large potential rewards for those who can upskill their teams and tackle the looming talent crunch.

To set up their organizations for growth, CFOs will need to be nimble in executing their strategies, evaluate the technologies they invest in, prioritize cybersecurity, integrate ESG reporting, and tackle talent crunch.  

1. Bringing to life 2024 growth plans 

In 2024, many CFOs focused on devising growth and reinvention plans to scale their businesses in a sustainable manner. In this quest, they had to be nimble and creative: according to , over 80 percent of CEOs thought that their company would no longer be viable if it did not try to reinvent itself. In order to succeed in 2025, CFOs will need to continue building trust with CEOs to partner on executing these plans successfully. 

To sell their vision in 2025, CFOs will also need to build their leadership image with the wider business, internal and external stakeholders. This is why they will need to dedicate resources to mastering their storytelling skills. This will enable finance leaders to ensure that peers and colleagues are aligned with the business鈥� short- and long-term planning, especially as it undergoes reinvention in challenging market conditions.  

2. Evaluating technologies for long-term benefit and efficiency 

According to the recent CFO Insights research by 麻豆原创 Concur, 94 percent of finance leaders say that AI has already helped improve decision-making. Also, 73 percent see a positive impact on cost and risk reduction. In 2025, CFOs need to lead the business-wide charge on delving deeper into the technologies they are investing in. As a number of companies are rushing to adopt AI, CFOs are uniquely positioned to ensure this adoption is truly valuable to the company. To do so, they can drive establishing ROI measures to ensure it is used productively and ethically.聽聽

They will need to be involved in critically evaluating the technologies that businesses invest in, ensuring that risks are properly assessed and in accordance with compliance or responsible-use frameworks.

With AI becoming an essential business tool across many industries, CFOs will need to make sure that it adheres to federal and international AI regulatory frameworks. They should also continue investing in new capabilities to strengthen their compliance, auditing, and planning toolkits. Because CFOs have a holistic view of their business鈥� data and needs, they have a unique insight into the most efficient ways to use .  

3. Prioritizing cybersecurity  

The global average cost of a data breach in 2024 is $4.88 million 鈥� 10 percent up on 2023, according to . The ubiquity of generative AI provides bad actors with more tools to commit complex fraud schemes. Consequently, in 2025, CFOs will need to dedicate resources to protecting their organizations from cybercrime in the coming year and onwards. According to CFO Insights research, 59 percent of finance leaders plan to increase their cybersecurity budget to respond to growing threats.

Because CFOs understand business risk and reporting, they are well-placed to take an oversight role. This best positions them to work with their business鈥� Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) to assess investments and the maturity of security arrangements, as well as budgets dedicated to this. 

Another way that CFOs can protect their organizations鈥� financial assets and data is to appropriately prepare their teams. Since human error remains the biggest risk for a cyber-attack, it is essential that CFOs educate their teams on best practices and develop incident response plans.  

4. Integrating ESG reporting 

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks are becoming increasingly important for businesses as wider regulation schemes are established globally. For CFOs to set up their business for success in 2025, they should embrace ESG as more than just a set of rules, but as a means to build a data base and strengthen their business鈥� profile. 

Forty-eight percent of finance leaders are focusing on sustainability and ESG to drive growth this year. Not only does collecting ESG data help boost a business鈥� revenue, but it presents them with a unique opportunity to see how they are performing and inform future related decisions. For example, giving employees sustainable business travel options and recording their decision can help inform future reporting. CFOs 鈥嬧�嬧�媠hould also set measurable goals for how sustainability data will be used to enhance the business鈥� performance and value creation. These goals will guide the development of the organization鈥檚 staff and its infrastructure. 

A CFO鈥檚 focus on integrating ESG reporting is one element of an even bigger shift 鈥� a shift from carbon counting to carbon accounting. In the future, organization鈥檚 entire carbon impact is going to become an integral part of its balance sheet, measured and managed with the same precision as the financial bottom line. A will form part of a more integrated view of reporting that goes way beyond financials. Adding this green ledger will help companies to a more holistic approach uniting financial and carbon accounting, making sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable.  

5. Retaining employees despite the “talent crunch“

In 2025, the workforce will continue to evolve, as baby boomers retire and young finance professionals re-evaluate their working priorities. CFOs will need to retain employees and keep them enthusiastic. They can do this by better understanding younger employees鈥� values and adapting development, training, and recruitment policies accordingly.  

They will also need to collaborate with HR to foster continuous learning, reskilling, and adaptability for staff. This same flexibility should be applied to bringing in new technology. By accepting to adopt these, businesses can drive more competition for the right talent.  

Similarly, CFOs can embrace using technologies such as AI to automate certain tasks, freeing people for more meaningful work. This not only resonates with the values of younger workers but will highlight to employees that their time is valued, boosting retention.  

A CFO鈥檚 role continues to evolve in challenging market and macroeconomic conditions, so adaptation and flexibility are key to unlocking rewards for themselves, their teams, and their organizations. Embracing the outlined strategies promises CFOs can continue to secure the business鈥� future and steer it toward success.

is chief financial officer for 麻豆原创 Concur.

If we can cut through the noise, proactive business leaders can not only prepare for these changes but seize the opportunity to drive strategic business value and even transformation.

My key takeaways for business:

• Large companies still have to report, while SMEs can gain an advantage through voluntary reporting
• Streamlined and integrated data management remains key for compliance and business value creation
• Get ahead by starting today

Sustainability regulations have been on a rollercoaster ride lately. To address concerns about the administrative burden, harmonization, and competitiveness, EU lawmakers have undertaken critical reviews of key policies, most notably the (CSRD).

Initial reactions to the Omnibus package ranged from celebratory to cautionary, with some media outlets pointing out “costly confusion” and even “catastrophic changes.” The slightest changes to any regulatory framework can spark confusion, but there is no need to panic. While still subject to final approval, the Omnibus package should provide companies extra time to prepare and reduced metrics to track.

Despite these proposed changes, business leaders should ensure their data management systems are equipped to handle the required sustainability metrics. Systems and processes for data management need to be instituted, KPIs identified, stakeholders managed — all of which takes time. As a rule of thumb, auditors recommend two years of preparation time before a reporting deadline hits. From automated collection and reporting to insights that drive measurable business value, an integrated data system has the potential to make sustainability data so much more than a mere component of compliance.

What are the changes in the Omnibus?

The Omnibus adjusts compliance thresholds, shifts reporting timelines, and removes the burden of CSRD reporting for small and midsize enterprises. Proposed changes include:

• Companies not yet required to report on FY 2024 will have a two-year delay (until 2028) before they must report with the CSRD
• Companies must have 1,000 employees and 鈧�50 million net turnover, or 鈧�25 million balance sheet to meet CSRD reporting threshold
• Limited assurance requirements are implemented in place of reasonable assurance
• Sector-specific reporting mandates have been eliminated
• Value chain data is only required from suppliers that also meet the reporting threshold
• Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) due diligence intervals increased from each year to every five years

All proposed changes are still subject to final approval.

What remains untouched in the Omnibus proposals?

Large European companies — those that were required to report with the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) — are still required to report with the CSRD this year for FY 2024, and are required to continue reporting despite the proposal. The pool of companies required to report will still expand, but now with a two-year delay and the timeline for non-EU parent companies has not changed. Companies with a two-year delay will still need to start preparing at least 12 months ahead of their new reporting deadlines.

Supply chain emissions, double materiality assessments, KPI identifying and tracking, and transition planning are all still fundamental to the CSRD. Supply chain data insights are still requirements of the CSDDD and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).

The metrics on which companies are required to report are likely to be reduced and simplified, but regulatory compliance still remains a data challenge that requires integrated solutions. For companies that are no longer required to report, voluntary reporting can prove beneficial if data insights are deployed strategically. With the right solutions, sustainability data can unlock valuable insights to improve business performance.

How can sustainability data improve business performance?

With all the new compliance measures businesses have to navigate, it can be easy to get reporting tunnel vision and lose sight of the wider goal: sustainable business outcomes and value creation for the business.

Rigorous sustainability reporting should drive operational efficiency. Combined with a wealth of sustainability data, supply chain scrutiny and systems analysis lay the groundwork for deriving strategic business value. For example, sustainability data supports effective risk management through visibility into risks and their strategic and financial impacts, lowers costs by creating efficiency gains, and provides the insights needed to take action.

Collecting and managing data to comply with sustainability regulations requires data management software. The bare bones solution is the helpful, yet error-prone, Excel spreadsheet, while at the opposite end of the data management spectrum is the ERP-centric system.

The spreadsheet might manage to painstakingly serve the compliance function, but it lacks the ability to provide real-time insights that align sustainability goals with financial goals. What鈥檚 worse is that after data is collected and reported, it lives — and dies — on the spreadsheet, offering no added value, and certainly driving no business transformation.

In contrast, by using an ERP-centric system, data needed to comply with sustainability regulations can be pulled, aggregated, and integrated into business systems like finance, procurement, and HR. In fact, an ERP-centric system can provide access to as much as 85 percent of the quantitative data required for CSRD compliance.

ERP systems are the catalyst for strategic business transformation and streamlined regulatory compliance. ERP combined with 麻豆原创 Sustainability solutions can provide access to sustainability data that permeates all business functions. Business leaders obtain the necessary insights to reduce carbon and material usage, accelerate CSRD compliance, and accurately measure the financial and sustainability impact of their decisions.

Get ahead by starting today

To stay ahead of current and upcoming regulations, streamlined and integrated management of data from operations and supply chain is essential. An ERP-centric approach can drive both sustainability and financial performance, with compliance being just the tip of the iceberg for ERP-centric sustainability data benefits.

Even with CSRD timelines extended for some companies, forward-thinking businesses have much to gain by continuing CSRD-aligned sustainability reporting now. This delay offers an opportunity to develop a strategic, technology-enabled approach to sustainability reporting that drives long-term business value.

Take action now and leverage 麻豆原创 Sustainability solutions to transform your data management and sustainability reporting, ensuring your business not only complies but thrives in the evolving regulatory landscape. To learn even more about the Omnibus changes and how an ERP-centric system can benefit your business, read 麻豆原创鈥檚 latest white paper on mastering CSRD.

Sophia Mendelsohn is chief sustainability and commercial officer at 麻豆原创.

The world has been waiting for a global plastics treaty since 2022, when representatives from 175 nations agreed on a mandate to create a legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution. While progress has been made during the five rounds of negotiations to date, a final treaty has yet to be agreed. With negotiations set to continue, 麻豆原创 has collaborated with to launch the 鈥淪hift into Gear鈥� report, inciting companies not to wait but to start preparing now to meet global plastics legislation.

It’s not just a reporting duty

Plastics regulation isn鈥檛 new. It has rapidly spread across the globe like a rising tide, driven by the urgency to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and curb the plastic waste that is choking both marine and land-based ecosystems. Companies now face the growing tide of extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations and pay plastic taxes in certain jurisdictions. Globally, the corporate liabilities linked to plastic usage are projected to exceed US$20 billion by 2030.

In this shifting landscape, 麻豆原创 and Earth Action argue that plastic and data management are no longer reporting duties only, but fundamental business imperatives. Companies that fail to navigate these waters may find themselves sinking under the weight of financial liabilities, whereas those that prepare, comply with regulations, and leverage digital solutions will ride the wave, standing to gain a competitive advantage.

Disparate EPR regulations make compliance onerous and expensive

Originally designed to fund waste management, EPR regulations are now focused on the eco-design and recyclability of items. Complications for corporations arise from the variety of different EPR regulations across different territories. The report describes how one consumer goods company operating in over 180 countries can face a minefield of 30 to 50 different EPR policies, which could cost in the region of 0.5%-1% of final product revenue. For multinational corporations, this can add up to millions of euros of risk鈥攐r opportunity.

Avoidance isn鈥檛 a viable option. Non-compliance comes with significant financial risks including fines, litigation, and potential clean-up costs. Reputational risk linked to consumer protection violations, false advertising, and environmental damage is also a factor that could result in revenue loss and a decline in investor confidence.

麻豆原创 joins forces to lobby for standardization

麻豆原创 is working with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, calling for industry alignment on packaging data. Together, we are pioneering a project to enable standardized data to be exchanged throughout supply chains. This can allow businesses to access and analyze materials from a variety of suppliers to empower the design of more sustainable and recyclable packaging, which can minimize waste and reduce EPR fees and plastic taxes.

Negotiations to finalize the global plastics treaty are expected to resume with delegates due to convene for INC 5.2 in 2025.

Companies should not delay

The report is clear. Companies must not wait for a finalized treaty before taking action. With a myriad of national and regional regulations already in existence, including the EU鈥檚 Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), there is already work to do. Delaying compliance may leave companies lagging behind and unable to meet existing and upcoming regulations, leading to the financial and reputational risks already mentioned. Under the PPWR, for example, the penalties for non-compliance are not just theoretical鈥攖hey are a looming reality. Each EU member state can impose sanctions that are effective, proportionate, and dissuasive, ranging from hefty fines to sales bans or mandatory product recalls because of non-compliant packaging. In other words, the clock is ticking and the consequences of inaction could hit harder than anticipated.

Early adopters stand to benefit from their experience and will be better prepared for the shifting regulatory field when the treaty enters into force. By proactively implementing robust data management solutions and streamlining their reporting processes, they can start to make gains in terms of circularity and sustainability. In doing so, they will obtain an unprecedented view of their plastic material flows, allowing them to unlock efficiencies and reduce risk.

Data management is critical

Contrary to an often referred to argument put forward by treaty detractors, the data organizations require for compliance does exist and can be found within existing enterprise systems. Companies should look to their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and financial reporting platforms. These are treasure troves, filled with procurement records, supplier data, and waste management information鈥攌ey assets for reporting purposes.

Businesses should also coordinate with their suppliers and customers with a view to data sharing for resource optimization and to scale efficiencies.

Data management systems like help companies collect and use data by aggregating it from third-party systems. It can not only allow sustainability managers to accurately calculate fees and taxes but can give them a lifecycle view of indirect taxation costs and, by considering downstream recyclability and recycled content, the environmental impact of design choices. The solution can also allow users to experiment with switching materials, products, and altering supply chains, providing them with the information they need for agile decision-making.

Prepare for an ambitious treaty

Corporations must invest in their enterprise systems to leverage data and collaborate with their supply chain to meet upcoming legislation and avoid risks and penalties of non-compliance. The sooner they start, the better their competitive advantage. By utilizing data management systems to collect robust data and collaborate with supply chains, they will be equipped to thrive in the era of plastic regulation, limiting their costs, achieving sustainability targets, and complying with evolving regulations.

Darren West is global head of Circular Economy Solutions at 麻豆原创.

All this hard work and ingenuity has turned Schaeffler into a reliable partner in making motion more efficient, intelligent, and sustainable across the entire life cycle.

According to Christof Heurung, head of Strategic Digitalization at Schaeffler: 鈥淲e see sustainability and digitalization as key topics for our future success. By combining the right digital technologies, such as AI innovations, with our pioneering spirit, we can take sustainability to the next level and create an even more sustainable future for Schaeffler, as well as for our customers and suppliers.鈥�

Partnering for Greener Supply Chain Digitalization

Shipping diverse offerings to customers worldwide requires a wide array of containers 鈥� all of which must be managed efficiently and transparently across internal operations, suppliers, and customers. However, to be successful, this approach demands the integration of numerous business systems and applications to access and exchange information securely, streamline processes strategically, and react to new challenges and opportunities with precision.

Unfortunately, most companies fall short of achieving this advantage. Shipping containers are often managed with a fragmented application landscape. This setup challenges the ability to respond quickly to packaging trends and new business requirements. It also limits the transparency needed to reconcile customers鈥� returnable-packaging accounts accurately and outsource delivery services to the right shared-service center. Suppliers using the same containers operate on a separate third-party system, leading to disjointed operations.

鈥淎fter using 麻豆原创 solutions for around 40 years now, during the past five years, we have established a strategic partnership with 麻豆原创 to develop and introduce new IT application systems while forging ahead in our desire to run a more sustainable operation,鈥� says Gerhard Stoessel, IT program lead for 麻豆原创 S/4HANA at the Schaeffler Group. 鈥淪uch a relationship is allowing Schaeffler and 麻豆原创 to identify unmet industry needs and launch numerous innovations.鈥�

Introducing Industry-Wide Circular Logistic Flows

One of those innovations is the solution. The industry-specific solution supports circular logistic flows for returnable and reusable packaging material such as containers, boxes, and pallets 鈥� from supplier and customer deliveries to intra-company movements and the journey back to the company.

When Schaeffler first used 麻豆原创 Returnable Packaging Management, it covered only 30% of container management requirements. Sven Proschek, product owner of 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud for logistics at Schaeffler, notes that the company鈥檚 close collaboration with 麻豆原创 was key to turning this trend around: 鈥淥ur partnership with 麻豆原创 enabled us to enrich the solution with the industry-relevant capabilities that companies like ours need, as well as near-seamless, end-to-end integration of the container management cycle.鈥�

Schaeffler is currently rolling out the solution across over 80 manufacturing plants in its worldwide ecosystem. This approach is streamlining the supply chain into a more efficient and robust network, resulting in fewer delivery failures and deeper transparency in the company鈥檚 packaging material inventory. The overall workload is decreasing even though the company ships products to more customers 鈥� thanks to AI capabilities such as container reconciliation automation and self-services for reordering packaging materials and checking inventory.

鈥淲e can now react quickly to new trends, support an end-to-end collaborative solution for suppliers and customers, and save time and costs through automation,鈥� Proschek reports. 鈥淓fficient container management also helps us avoid delivery failures due to shortages.鈥�

Making Sustainability More Cost-Efficient

Schaeffler is also exploring new AI-enabled capabilities for 麻豆原创 Returnable Packaging Management that can help the business, as well as its peers, further bridge the gap between sustainability and cost efficiency.

One idea that is gaining traction is machine learning-powered returnable packaging account matching. It aims to reduce the manual effort needed to analyze unmatched items and determine whether the underlying issue is a logistical exception or a discrepancy in matching attributes between incoming statements and open line items.

With this capability, Schaeffler can perform returnable account matching with the help of machine learning models and automate the matching process by activating line-item matching. Doing so streamlines the reconciliation process and enhances efficiency, empowering packaging planners to focus on strategic tasks. Additionally, it minimizes errors and increases the accuracy of the returnable packaging material inventory across the supply chain.

Expanding the Possibilities with a Future-Minded Vision

Schaeffler’s commitment to innovation and sustainability is evident in its adoption of AI-powered solutions for sustainable packaging and supply chain management. By using technologies such as the line-item matching functionality available in 麻豆原创 Returnable Packaging Management, Schaeffler is not only streamlining its operations but also reducing costs, minimizing errors, and increasing efficiency.

As Schaeffler continues to lead the way in sustainable packaging practices, it sets a compelling example for the industry, showcasing the transformative potential of cloud innovations and AI in driving sustainable business practices.

Korbinian Koblitz is Business Development lead at 麻豆原创.

Once perceived as a distant issue, food insecurity became a lived experience for millions as economic instability, layoffs, and shortages spiraled out of control. Even in the most affluent countries, the cracks became visible. In March 2020, a former refugee, , watched as social service agencies and food banks in his adoptive country of Switzerland were shuttered, risking enormous food waste and adding to the 745,000 people already living below the poverty line in one of the world鈥檚 most prosperous nations.

Meanwhile, an unprecedented lockdown created drastic shifts in consumer demand, and surplus food and other necessities accumulated in warehouses while families went hungry, amplifying another existing crisis: food waste. Millions of tons of food are lost annually in Switzerland alone, and food waste worldwide accounts for a quarter of the environmental impact of the entire food system.                                

As the pandemic wore on, Diare-Conde saw an opportunity to tackle two urgent challenges simultaneously 鈥� feeding people in need and reducing food waste. He founded (EfA), an entirely volunteer-run non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to eradicating hunger in Switzerland by redistributing surplus food to anyone who needs it. Essen f眉r Alle means 鈥渇ood for all.鈥�

The Right Partners, Across Generations, at the Right Time

Diare-Conde found an unlikely IT lead in then-thirteen-year-old , who coded the software that got EfA up and running, collecting and distributing food at its first location in Zurich. As the organization continued to grow, Beeler鈥檚 heroic, homegrown solution was struggling to keep up with increasingly complex logistics 鈥� coordinating the shifts of hundreds of volunteer workers, tracking the intake and distribution of thousands of pounds of food and other supplies, and keeping secure records 鈥� especially, Diare-Conde explained, since EfA鈥檚 IT lead was often otherwise occupied with school and homework.

EfA needed a secure, scalable, user-friendly solution that would help maximize the organization鈥檚 resources and supplies and, therefore, impact. Enter , who brought Diare-Conde a possible solution: perhaps Nadjmabadi鈥檚 employer could sponsor the organization鈥檚 new software and build EfA a cloud-based technology foundation. Nadjmabadi鈥檚 employer? 麻豆原创 Switzerland. Diare-Conde was quickly convinced. 麻豆原创 jumped on board, and within five months EfA鈥檚 new software, created using (麻豆原创 BTP), went live.

Streamlining Aid, Maximizing Reach

In the short time since, EfA鈥檚 user-friendly, cloud-based, mobile-optimized solution has streamlined food distribution and volunteer management 鈥� enabling the distribution of around 900 tons of food and the management of 10,000 volunteer shifts 鈥� while offering 360-degree visibility for planning and oversight and providing advanced analytics to enable further process innovation and optimization.

Of particular importance to EfA鈥檚 clients were the new solution鈥檚 stringent protocols for safeguarding sensitive personal data. 鈥淢any clients come to us asking if we can guarantee that [their] details will be kept securely, and I can say we work with 麻豆原创 so we have everything we need to guarantee secure data handling,鈥� Diare-Conde said.

By leveraging the 麻豆原创 BTP AI-enabled business optical character recognition (OCR) capability, new clients experience a seamless registration process with a passport scanner that securely captures their personal information, while returning clients benefit from a smooth and efficient check-in experience.

The scalable, cloud-based 麻豆原创 BTP solution that runs on a database as a service means that EfA鈥檚 technology solutions can quickly and efficiently evolve with the organization. 鈥淲e are constantly working on enhancements and improvements to the existing solution,鈥� Nadjmabadi said. 麻豆原创 BTP was instrumental in integrating and connecting the entire EfA landscape.

For now, every Saturday, volunteers from a database that has grown to 1,000 members distribute 20 tons of food to 2,000 people at up to five locations across Switzerland. And, Beeler explained, EfA鈥檚 impact is even more significant than these numbers suggest because some recipients are collecting food for an entire family, meaning that the organization鈥檚 dedicated volunteers serve as many as 10,000 people each week.

A Beacon of Hope

Unfortunately, demand for EfA鈥檚 services will only be increasing. In 2023, 30,223 refugees applied for asylum in Switzerland, up 20% from 2022. Diare-Conde plans to keep pace: 鈥淲e will cover almost all of Switzerland soon.鈥� And the NGO isn鈥檛 stopping there 鈥� the organization is currently exploring a partnership with a prominent German food bank.

But given that food waste is estimated to account for 8% to 10% of global greenhouse gases, EfA鈥檚 impact is already reverberating beyond Switzerland鈥檚 borders by directing thousands of tons of food that might otherwise be wasted onto the plates of people in need and by blazing a bold trail that others may follow.

For the full Essen f眉r Alle episode and the on-demand Better Together: Customer Conversations series, visit .

Technology Serving People

The human side of technology is about ensuring that technology serves people, not vice versa. Known for his thought leadership in intelligent automation and digital transformation, said: 鈥淚t鈥檚 about designing and implementing technology with empathy, understanding how it impacts individuals and society. Doing so enables a future where innovation benefits everyone 鈥� ethically, inclusively, and sustainably.鈥�

Timo Elliott is VP and global innovation advocate for 麻豆原创 BTP at 麻豆原创.

Part of 麻豆原创 Sustainability solutions, 麻豆原创 Green Ledger allocates carbon emissions to specific economic activities and transactions captured by ERP solutions from 麻豆原创. This innovation empowers organizations to accurately account for, analyze and report carbon footprints across products, services, and organizational units.

Addressing the growing consensus that decarbonization is required to combat climate change, 麻豆原创 Green Ledger helps companies:

• Track and account for carbon footprints in relation to their financial impact
• Lower emissions alongside financial optimization and thus facilitate carbon budgeting
• Establish carbon planning for carbon neutrality and net zero targets
• Benchmark departments, business units and profit centers from both a financial and environmental perspective
• Prepare for sustainability audits
• Improve supplier-based processes to decrease carbon emissions in the supply chain (2025)

麻豆原创 Green Ledger builds on existing financial and ERP solutions from 麻豆原创 that are established in thousands of companies worldwide. By extending these solutions to integrate emissions data, businesses can make more informed, sustainable decisions that link environmental impact with financial performance, enhancing compliance, efficiency and transparency.

鈥淓normous investments are required to abate CO₂ in order to curb global warming. Besides smart, reliable regulation also accurate data on emissions along the supply chain is paramount to trigger the necessary investment,鈥� said Dominik Asam, CFO and member of the Executive Board of 麻豆原创 SE. 鈥淥nly by moving from averages to actuals 鈥� audited at reasonable assurance 鈥� can freeriding and greenwashing be avoided, thereby protecting such valuable investment and our planet. 麻豆原创 Green Ledger delivers precisely that.鈥�

Today, 麻豆原创 Green Ledger provides a first step for businesses to address regulatory requirements by integrating financial and environmental data. It helps companies navigate the complex global landscape of sustainability regulations, such as EU CSRD*, while establishing a scalable foundation over time, to adapt to evolving regulations such as EU ETS** and EU CBAM鈥�, as well as to international standards such as ISSB鈥犫��. The launch of the solution marks the beginning of a new era in carbon accounting systems, which are expected to significantly impact businesses worldwide as decarbonization becomes a legal and market imperative.

麻豆原创 Green Ledger was developed with support from companies such as Accenture, Deloitte, EY, PwC and TCS (Tata Consulting Services) as well as with pilot customers such as Covestro. Covestro is currently evaluating 麻豆原创 Green Ledger in an early pilot phase and testing the linking of carbon dioxide values to 麻豆原创 Green Ledger, as they are generated during the manufacture of specific products in the supply chain.

Accenture is helping organizations achieve their net-zero and sustainability targets in a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape.  鈥淎s organizations seek to gain visibility into both the financial and environmental performance of their businesses, 麻豆原创 Green Ledger can provide the sustainability metrics and insights needed to enhance decision-making that reduces emissions, drives efficiencies and optimizes performance,鈥� said Stephanie Jamison, global resources industry practice chair and global sustainability services lead at Accenture. 鈥淎s a strategic co-innovation partner, Accenture helped shape the development of 麻豆原创 Green Ledger and can apply our understanding of the technology and its capabilities to help our clients get the most for their organization.鈥�

Through its Strategic Advisory Group for Green Ledger, 麻豆原创 was able to gain insights from Deloitte鈥檚 breadth and depth of knowledge in sustainability measurement and reporting. 鈥溌槎乖� Green Ledger offers new levels of precision in carbon accounting for organizations as they track, manage and report their greenhouse gas emissions, and provides leaders with a holistic view of the costs and benefits of sustainability initiatives, enabling them to make data-driven decisions that can build business resilience,鈥� said Jennifer Steinmann, Deloitte Global Sustainability Business leader.

Deloitte is working with companies as they adopt sustainability disclosure standards and get ready for assurance. 鈥淭echnology solutions can help generate traceable, bottom-up emissions data,鈥� said Veronica Poole, Deloitte Global IFRS and Corporate Reporting leader. 鈥淟everaging the robust governance and controls of enterprise systems is needed to help organizations achieve the rigor that enhances corporate accountability and enables a move to reasonable assurance.鈥�

Norman Emmenlauer, partner for CFO-Led Sustainability at EY Business Consulting, said about 麻豆原创 Green Ledger: 鈥淭his is a solution that integrates carbon accounting into the core financial processes, making sustainability a tangible part of business operations.鈥�

Carina Schoellmann, partner for ESG Data & Tech at EY Technology Consulting, added: “This solution will help our EY clients by seamlessly integrating carbon accounting into their financial systems, enabling more informed and sustainable decision-making.”

Amy Brachio, EY global vice chair for Sustainability, pointed to the strategic nature of the topic: 鈥淪ustainability is at the heart of everything organizations do; business operations such as procurement, manufacturing and logistics are great examples. 麻豆原创 Green Ledger will enable granular and auditable data capture across the value chain, supporting organizations to transform ESG from compliance exercise to value-creation strategy.鈥�

Sameer Shah, partner at EY Technology Consulting, added: “麻豆原创 Green Ledger is a game changer for sustainability practitioners, providing the tools needed to measure, manage and report on carbon emissions with the same rigor as financial data.”

“Having participated in the pilot program, we’re excited to see the launch of 麻豆原创 Green Ledger, an essential digital approach for integrating carbon accounting and management into strategic business operations,” explained Will Jackson-Moore, global sustainability leader, PwC UK. “With 麻豆原创 Green Ledger, businesses can seamlessly align financial performance with sustainability goals, while achieving the transparency and precision needed for real-time emissions reporting and resource management. Building on this foundation, PwC is developing CSRD-ready content to enable end-to-end reporting and steering, helping organisations meet regulatory requirements, prioritise sustainability at the C-level, and drive meaningful change in environmental accountability. We’re proud to support our clients in leveraging 麻豆原创 Green Ledger to navigate complex sustainability challenges, achieve measurable decarbonisation and progress toward net-zero commitments at speed.”

麻豆原创 partner TCS has also cooperated on 麻豆原创 Green Ledger, with a focus on accelerating action to achieve carbon neutrality. TCS Enterprise Solutions Global Head Vikram Karakoti said, 鈥淲ith our participation in the pilot program for 麻豆原创 Green Ledger, TCS is embracing innovative sustainability solutions to build a better future. This will enable organizations to move beyond regulatory compliance and make sustainability a growth engine. By embedding carbon data into the enterprise planning process, organizations can unlock previously unexplored areas for growth, transformation and environmental renewal.鈥�

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*The (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) defines the rules concerning the social and environmental information that companies have to report. It entered into force on 5 January 2023.
**The (EU Emissions Trading System) is a 鈥渃ap and trade鈥� system to reduce emissions via a carbon market. Since 2005, it requires polluters to pay for their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, covering emissions from the electricity and heat generation, industrial manufacturing and aviation sectors 鈥� which account for roughly 40% of total GHG emissions in the EU.
鈥烛丑别 (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) is the EU’s tool to put a fair price on the carbon emitted during the production of carbon-intensive goods that are entering the EU, and to encourage cleaner industrial production in non-EU countries. CBAM will apply in its definitive regime from 2026.
鈥犫�烛丑别 (International Sustainability Standards Board) is developing 鈥� in the public interest 鈥� standards that will result in a high-quality, comprehensive global baseline of sustainability disclosures focused on the needs of investors and the financial markets.

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This document contains forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors section of 麻豆原创鈥檚 2023 Annual Report on Form 20-F.
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麻豆原创 and other 麻豆原创 products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of 麻豆原创 SE (or its affiliates) in Germany and other countries. Please see for additional trademark information and notices.

The energy transition is creating a profound shift across industries and global economies. Amplified by technological innovation and intense competition, it is reshaping sectors and shifting economies toward renewable energy. This change is not only an environmental necessity but also a catalyst for economic growth, challenging the traditional dominance of fossil fuels. With capital investments increasingly directed toward renewable energy infrastructure, investors are aligning their priorities with sustainability, signaling that profitability and environmental stewardship can coexist. Yet, the ongoing prominence of oil and gas underlines the complexity and scale of this transition. 

In parallel, the circular economy is gaining momentum as businesses address the dual challenges of material scarcity and carbon reduction. At COP29, there was significant discussion about how a circular approach focused on rethinking supply chains, redesigning products, and optimizing resources could reduce dependency on finite materials while driving sustainable economic growth. By adopting circular economy principles, businesses can minimize waste and keep valuable materials in circulation, contributing to a more resilient and sustainable future. 

The Role of Business in Transforming Climate Commitments into Tangible Outcomes 

One of the central discussions at COP29 was the need for harmonizing global standards for carbon reduction and accounting. Foreign policy players, along with the private sector, stressed the importance of mobilizing finance for sustainable capitalism. In particular, there was a call for clearer and standardized reporting frameworks to simplify the process and ensure transparency. One critical area was the importance of accurate data collection for carbon markets and product-level carbon accounting, which can help businesses engage consumers and reduce emissions. 

There are three ways technology plays a pivotal role in addressing some of these challenges: 

• is available in every organization鈥檚 ERP system, so it鈥檚 time to start automating data collection and reporting processes to ease some of the regulatory burden.
• Companies should leverage IT spending to support sustainability initiatives, specifically to optimize climate solutions and create circular products.
• Companies must shift focus on the to pinpoint areas with the most significant impact.

From Policy to Practice: How Technology and Global Standards Can Accelerate Climate Action 

Empowered by technology and guided by clear policies, businesses have a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between high-level climate commitments and actionable, on-the-ground strategies. 

Central to this is aligning sustainability and financial priorities. Effective demands collaboration between chief sustainability officers and chief financial officers, as climate change has evolved from an ethical and environmental issue to a pressing financial imperative. 

To accelerate progress, we need globally harmonized policies, rigorous carbon accounting frameworks, and advanced technology solutions. By embedding AI-driven innovation, robust reporting standards, and actionable insights into business operations, we can ensure that COP events, such as COP29 in Baku, are remembered as turning points 鈥� not just discussions. While the challenges ahead are formidable, the opportunities for transformative action are even greater 鈥� and is here to lead the way on a low-carbon, future. 

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Sophia Mendelsohn is chief sustainability and commercial officer at 麻豆原创.

The global skills and opportunity gap is a recurring topic at landmark events such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos and UN General Assembly and Climate Week in New York. This is no different at the current UN Conference of the Parties () in Baku, Azerbaijan.

That鈥檚 because today’s youth are the leaders, innovators, and problem-solvers of tomorrow. However, as these gaps remain, it’s important to accelerate active engagement and enhance collaboration across sectors. Ensuring that young people are adequately prepared to enter and excel in the workforce is an investment in their future and a strategic imperative for businesses and societies worldwide. Without adequate learning pathways, young people risk unemployment and businesses may struggle to compete in the burgeoning green and digital economies due to a widening talent shortage.

Human Capital and Youth Day

For this reason, November 18 has been designated as the COP29 theme day for Human Capital Development for Climate Resilience. The initiative underscores that addressing climate change requires a holistic approach supported by healthier, better educated, and adequately skilled young people.

The Human Capital Day serves as a reminder that tackling climate change requires societal transformation 鈥� and there is no better time than now. A key component of this shift is ensuring access to quality education and skill development opportunities for youth that lead to tangible employment opportunities. According to the  (ILO), global youth unemployment was 13% in 2023, with many young people facing limited prospects for stable and decent work. At the same time, the  found that 44% of businesses report difficulties in finding talent with the right skills to fill jobs.

At 麻豆原创, we believe in our responsibility to support the next generation of professionals and users with our best-in-class digital learning. We fully support the COP29 agenda for human capital and are actively involved with the global community of governments, financial institutions, and private sector entities.

麻豆原创 Education and Employment Programs

麻豆原创 has several programs and partnerships to help tackle the deepening mismatch between the supply of young job seekers and the demand for skilled talent. These initiatives focus on human capital development and provide valuable educational opportunities for youth:

• 麻豆原创 and UNICEF鈥檚 partnership in support of Generation Unlimited develops innovative solutions to global skilling challenges to help young people transition to earning. The goal is to generate inclusive opportunities for underserved young people worldwide, preparing them for decent work with the skills needed in the market. The program helps equip youth with essential skills and builds on UNICEF鈥檚 Generation Unlimited (GenU) signature program, the Youth Agency Marketplace (YOMA), a platform developed by young Africans to tackle labor market challenges. To date, the partnership reached more than 600,000 youth with foundational and digital skills that help young people unlock opportunities in the changing global economy.
• 麻豆原创 Educate to Employ is one of the learn-to-earn pathways on YOMA designed by 麻豆原创 to equip youth with essential competencies for the digital economy. Implemented by a local social enterprise in South Africa called UMUZI, the free program focuses on developing skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values to help prepare and bring candidates into employment within the 麻豆原创 ecosystem. More than 1,000 learners completed one or more foundational skills courses, while 165 learners completed over 550 hours of critical skills development training and earned an 麻豆原创 technology consultant professional certificate. The next step is to secure meaningful employment opportunities within the 麻豆原创 ecosystem and beyond.
• The 麻豆原创 University Alliances program includes over 2,700 members in more than 100 countries. It enables academia to educate the next generation on using intelligent AI-enabled technology, engage at 麻豆原创 events, build industry partnerships, and prepare graduates for the 麻豆原创 ecosystem. 麻豆原创 University Alliances initiatives aim to empower youth to work in digitized enterprises, shape their futures, and have a meaningful impact on the world. During COP29, 麻豆原创 will engage with students and faculty members from local university partners in Baku. Planned activities include an on-campus, gamified learning experience with a focus on sustainability, dialogue on learning and skills for sustainable youth development, and student visits to 麻豆原创鈥檚 booth in the Green Zone.

To further amplify youth empowerment, 麻豆原创 actively collaborates with leading youth organizations. Through these partnerships, 麻豆原创 brings young voices to the forefront of decision-making, fostering intergenerational collaboration and innovative solutions to pressing global challenges.

• We Are Family Foundation (WAFF) is a non-profit organization that empowers youth and brings them to decision-making tables to share ideas and innovative solutions for global problems. For instance, at COP29, WAFF, in partnership with Care About Climate and Groundswell, launched the Universal NDC Youth Clause campaign 鈥� a global call to action for governments to integrate youth voices into their updated climate plans due in February 2025. By adopting this clause, governments pledge to work collaboratively with young people to achieve ambitious climate goals.
• The 麻豆原创 and World Scouting partnership examines the critical role that youth-led initiatives play in advancing environmental sustainability. It provides opportunities to share insights on successful youth-driven projects and discuss challenges and the support needed to scale efforts. The engagement is based on the premise that young people are at the forefront of environmental activism and are leveraging technology, creativity, and community engagement to make tangible impacts amid unprecedented environmental challenges.

As the world grapples with urgent challenges like climate change and digital transformation, 麻豆原创 believes that investing in youth and human development has never been more crucial. 麻豆原创鈥檚 contribution to building a sustainable future through initiatives that equip young people with job-ready skills underscores the importance of a whole-of-society approach.

By collaborating with global multistakeholder partners and empowering the next generation, we can help bridge the talent gap, foster climate resilience, and ensure that today鈥檚 youth are prepared to lead us into a more sustainable and inclusive future.

The company has expanded its international operations in recent years through organic growth and acquisitions, says Roca Group Digital Transformation Director Jacques Nieuwland. 鈥淲e have had the challenges of most industries in the last years,鈥� he says. 鈥淢y job is to help Roca leverage technology to support the different strategic objectives of the company, which are growth, innovation, operational excellence, and sustainability.鈥�

Global Supply Chain

鈥淲e have a global supply chain for some of our components, so we need to plan in a more agile way,鈥� Nieuwland says. 鈥淲e need to update our planning and we need to be able to put in some buffers to have a resilient supply chain.鈥�

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Nieuwland says technology helps by giving Roca greater visibility into its supply chain. 鈥淓verybody collaborates against the same processes with the same data. We include our own value chain and also the value chain of our suppliers and customers,鈥� he says. 鈥淎nd this enhanced visibility allows us to optimize the whole value chain and to take the right decisions.鈥�

麻豆原创 is the backbone of the company鈥檚 application landscape, he says: 鈥淲e perform our core processes, which include order processing, reordering planning, and many others via 麻豆原创 solutions. It helps us because it gives us a structure of processes, of data, and of reports that allow us to understand our business, to replicate it, to scale it, and to continuously improve it.鈥�

Roca uses the solution to help it anticipate the demand for specific products and adjust production accordingly. That way, Nieuwland says, 鈥渨e are able to give an excellent service and to optimize stocks.鈥�

Long-Term Partnership

Nieuwland says Roca Group chose 麻豆原创 to be its technology partner because of its long-term relationship with 麻豆原创 and because 麻豆原创 is a leader in many of the solutions Roca needed. 鈥淲e have a long history of collaboration and have been successful. [鈥 We trust the technology, the digital supply chain solution, [and] the business network solution. We like to work with leading solutions 鈥� we trust them.鈥�

Earlier this year Roca selected and is preparing to go live with 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud at the beginning of 2025 for the next phase of its digital transformation 鈥� a move that Nieuwland believes will enable even more innovation. 鈥淲e have chosen the cloud-based solution because 麻豆原创 innovates first on the cloud-based solution and we want to leverage that innovation,鈥� he says.

He adds that the integration of 麻豆原创鈥檚 generative AI copilot into 麻豆原创鈥檚 cloud ERP will also fuel innovation and productivity. 鈥淲e think there is huge potential to increase our productivity,鈥� he says. More generally, he says 麻豆原创鈥檚 cutting-edge technology will help Roca improve its service to customers and interact better with them, as well as help the company achieve operational excellence including, for example, reducing waste and improving sustainability.

Sustainability

On sustainability, Nieuwland says Roca Group is studying scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3 emissions. It has already set yearly targets for the reduction of CO2 and wants to be carbon neutral by 2045. More generally, he says Roca鈥檚 goal is to deliver 鈥渢he best bathroom experience for customers worldwide.鈥�

Asked what other manufacturers can learn from Roca鈥檚 experience, he says: 鈥淚t’s very important to start with a business problem, a business challenge, and put technology at the service of generating business value. Then it’s very important to work in cross-functional teams. So, this is not about buying hundreds of solutions to solve isolated problems. We need to think on a bigger scale and to work together to find the best solution to our challenges and use few solutions and have an enterprise architecture that support our goals.鈥�

With automated Emission Factor Mapping in 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management and AI-assisted ESG Report Generation in 麻豆原创 Sustainability Control Tower, 麻豆原创 can support companies in setting meaningful environmental targets, ensuring compliance, and managing carbon footprints with heightened efficiency and accountability.

鈥淪ustainability executives are on board with artificial intelligence. More than half say improving data analysis and consolidation using AI are top actions they will be taking over the next three years to enhance ESG capabilities.鈥�

Addressing the Strategy Execution Gap in Sustainability Reporting, KPMG, February 2024

Emission Factor Mapping in 麻豆原创 Sustainability Footprint Management

To calculate product carbon footprints accurately, companies must assign emission factors to thousands of purchased products. Ideally, emission factors are provided directly by suppliers, but often companies need to use industry averages based on product attributes like name, category, or location. Up until now, this mapping process has been a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone task that required expertise in lifecycle assessment (LCA), determining the environmental impacts associated with all the stages of the lifecycle of a product, process, or service.

To help make this process easier and more efficient, 麻豆原创 has introduced an AI-based capability within the solution. for purchased products and services and can assign a similarity score to each recommendation.

For the mapping, 麻豆原创 generates embeddings for both, emission factors from LCA databases and product data from the ERP system. Embeddings are vector representations 鈥� numerical representations of textual information to provide context and meaning of a text. Both sets of embeddings are saved in 麻豆原创 HANA Cloud vector engine.

The system compares these embeddings to help identify the quality of the mapping and provide suggested results. This helps businesses reduce manual effort by up to 80% and calculate product and corporate carbon footprints quicker and with greater precision, even without LCA experts. It can also accelerate their sustainability reporting timelines and help them respond faster to regulatory demands.

AI-Assisted ESG Report Generation in 麻豆原创 Sustainability Control Tower

In addition, 麻豆原创 embedded a generative AI-powered reporting capability within 麻豆原创 Sustainability Control Tower. Creating sustainability reports that align with internal strategies and meet external standards, such as the CSRD, is essential for staying compliant and transparent. However, gathering relevant environmental, social, and governance data and drafting these reports can be highly resource-intensive, involving multiple teams and complex data sources.

That鈥檚 why 麻豆原创鈥檚 AI capability helps generate comprehensive ESG report drafts based on best-practice templates and the company鈥檚 available ESG metrics. Once users select a template, , create graphs to visualize the data, and generate a polished report draft. That helps companies spend up to 98% less time collecting ESG metrics and up to 80% less time in creating a report.

Some key benefits of the feature include:

• Efficient data utilization: The AI-powered solution leverages large language models and SQL grounding techniques, which help transform natural language inquiries into precise database queries that access real-time data from structured databases. That鈥檚 how it transforms raw data from customers’ systems into accurate, comprehensive reports tailored to specific timeframes.
• Visualization: The AI generates insightful textual content through SQL-based data retrieval, helping to ensure data integrity and compliance. Additionally, it creates visually appealing charts and tables to help enhance report clarity and understanding.
• Automated verification: Our robust system prioritizes data security by avoiding direct SQL query execution and employing a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) process to help safeguard against informational discrepancies.

The Future of AI in Sustainability

The use cases above are just the beginning. AI鈥檚 potential to transform sustainability management is enormous, and at 麻豆原创 we are accelerating the creation of use cases to be at the forefront of our customers鈥� sustainable transformation journeys. For example, users will be able to interact through natural language with 麻豆原创鈥檚 AI copilot that can offer actionable recommendations and simulations to help improve environmental and social performance. And we will continue to apply AI to make the acquisition of sustainability data easier.

Using 麻豆原创鈥檚 ERP-centric, cloud-based, AI-enabled approach, we鈥檙e working to ensure AI鈥檚 massive potential turns into both real business transformation and sustainability outcomes. AI and technology can help us better understand and monitor the environment, improve energy efficiency, optimize resource management, and develop innovative solutions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

As COP29 convenes in Baku, it is essential for global leaders and decision-makers to fully explore AI’s transformative role in addressing climate change. The urgent demands of this crisis call for the kind of innovative, AI-driven solutions that can unlock greater precision, efficiency, and impact. By leveraging AI not only to streamline business operations but also to set and meet ambitious environmental goals, we are shaping a future where technology empowers businesses to thrive responsibly, contributing actively to a sustainable and resilient planet.

Gunther Rothermel is chief product officer and co-GM for 麻豆原创 Sustainability.