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SAP’s Peter Graf on the World Business Summit on Climate Change

I spoke to SAP‘s Chief Sustainability Officer, Peter Graf about his attendance at the World Business Summit on Climate Change which took place in Copenhagen recently.

When you hear of businesses getting together to discuss climate change, you could easily be tempted to think they are trying to lobby for less regulation or for licenses to pollute. However, the mandate for attendees was for CEOs to:

discuss how their firms can help solve the climate crisis through innovative business models, new partnerships, and the development of low-carbon technologies

The result of the meeting was a document called The Copenhagen Call which sets out 6 steps to be implemented to set a firm foundation for a sustainable economic future

  1. Agreement on a science-based greenhouse gas stabilization path with 2020 and 2050 emissions reduction targets that will achieve it;
  2. Effective measurement, reporting and verification of emissions performance by business;
  3. Incentives for a dramatic increase in financing low emissions technologies;
  4. Deployment of existing low-emissions technologies and the development of new ones;
  5. Funds to make communities more resilient and able to adapt to the effects of climate change, and
  6. Means to finance forest protection.
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SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer on Carbon Reduction

I was in San Jose last week for for the O’Reilly ETech conference. I had an opportunity to meet SAP’s newly appointed Chief Sustainability Officer, Peter Graf and we discussed SAP’s announced aim of reducing its carbon emissions by 51% by 2020.

Some great stuff in the video – I especially loved the bit where Peter talked about the enthusiasm of SAP employees for getting on board with this program. They asked for Sustainability Champions for the company hoping to get 100 by the end of March. They had 200 by the end of the 2nd day!!! Everyone wants to be doing the right thing.

This is part II of a three-part video series I shot with Peter. I published the first part, where Peter discusses the role of Chief Sustainability Officer for SAP earlier this week and the third part will be published next week.

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SAP’s Peter Graf discusses his role – Chief Sustainability Officer

ERP software maker SAP is, according to Wikipedia, the world’s 4th largest software co. in the world (presumably after Google, Microsoft and Oracle).

It is a big deal then when a company of SAP’s size announces the creation of the position of Chief Sustainability Officer, as SAP did earlier this month.

In the same announcement SAP also announced targets to reduce carbon emissions by 51% and to help their customers reduce their emissions.

Having talked to SAP previously, I know this is not a sudden conversion on their part but I was interested to talk to their new Sustainability chief, Peter Graf to ask him about the announcements.

We recorded three videos on the three parts of the announcement – this is the first one where Peter discusses the new role.