Greenhouse Gas Footprint

Greenhouse Gas reduced by 6% despite double-digit growth

To drill deeper into our greenhouse gas footprint, select the measure, geography and scope you want to see from the pull-down menus. For a further breakdown by emissions source, click on the multi-colored bars on the graph. The orange line on our global emissions graph indicates our goal for greenhouse gas emissions through 2020.

We analyzed our environmental impact and determined that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions represent the greatest opportunity for us to make positive change. Our goal is to reduce our emissions to their 2000 level by the year 2020 in ways that best support profitability. In 2010 we continued on our path to achieve this milestone.

After a significant reduction in greenhouse gases in 2009, the global economy started to rebound and we faced a new challenge: how to continue to lower our emissions even as business picked up. Up to this point, our business performance was always in line with our emissions, but 2010 was the first year we were able to demonstrate that strong environmental results and strong business results go hand-in-hand.

Through a variety of actions, we achieved a 6% drop in emissions while at the same time delivering revenue growth of 17%. Our total emissions in 2010¹ reached a total of 425 kilotons, representing a drop of 25% from their peak in 2007.

A more specific breakdown gives further insight into our successes and where we see room for improvement. The examples below show what happened to our emissions in five key areas:

• Electricity usage: 9% reduction
• Corporate Cars: 1% reduction
• Business Flights: 33% increase
• Employee Commuting: 14% reduction

We also increased our purchase of renewable energy, which helped reduce our overall footprint by 11%.

Taken together, these changes contributed to our overall carbon drop of 6% in 2010. More specifically, the chart above shows our emissions per employee and per Euro of revenue. These figures provide insight into how efficiently we are managing our greenhouse gas emissions as we conduct our business activities and continue to grow. What we found is that our emissions per employee went down in 2010 by about 8%, and per Euro of revenue by 19%.

425kTons of greenhouse gas

Quarterly visibility helps drive mid-course actions to exceed our goal

This reduction keeps us well on track to reach our 2020 goal, with our emissions now on a steady decline for the past three years. What’s more, our journey has given us insights that we are now utilizing to serve our customers. We monitor and report on our carbon footprint on a quarterly basis, which enables us to make adjustments throughout the year to ensure that we meet our year-end target. In the fourth quarter, for example, we called on our employees throughout SAP to consider alternatives to business flights for internal meetings; we saw a drop in air travel, making that quarter the lowest for emissions in all of 2010. This helped us achieve our target despite an increase of 33% in flight emissions overall for the year. In 2010 for the first time, we used our own SAP Carbon Impact software to publicly report our emissions.

Energy-saving projects contributed to reducing our emissions from electricity consumption by 9%, saving over 12 kTons

Several other key factors led to our continued emissions decrease in 2010. One was our ongoing investment in more than 25 energy efficiency projects throughout the world. Overall, these initiatives were a factor in achieving a 9% drop in emissions from electricity usage. For more specific information, please see total energy.

Reduced emissions from employee commuting by 14% or 6 kTons

We encouraged our employees to shift their commuting behavior. Emissions from commuting dropped by 14%, a change that we recognize called for ongoing commitment. In addition to encouraging the use of mass transit and carpooling, we also began providing employees with information on their carbon footprint from commuting through a new internal dashboard aimed at ensuring greater transparency and accountability.

Savings of 48 kTons from increased renewable energy

Finally, we attribute our emissions reduction to our increased use of renewable energy. In 2010, a shift to purchasing more renewables accounted for a drop of 48 kilotons in GHG emissions. More specifically, SAP purchases 35% of our total electricity in renewables; an additional 13% of our electricity is from renewable electricity already available through local electricity grids. For more information please see renewable energy.

It is worth noting that we would have reached our target for 2010 of 485 kilotons GHG even without purchasing renewable energy. This result underscores that a successful carbon strategy does not hinge on any one approach, and we will continue evolving our strategy based on a range of considerations.

Key areas of opportunity for future reductions

We deepened our carbon strategy through our development of a carbon abatement cost curve, a technique to plot the cost of projects against their payoff in actual reductions, or abatements. The values are stated per ton of CO₂. SAP is among the first companies to create an abatement cost curve, which has to date been deployed mostly by countries or regions to craft their carbon strategies. Read more about our Carbon Abatement Cost Curve

We have identified areas of improvement that will require us to call on the continued efforts of our employees. Business flights, for example, remain the single largest contributor to our footprint, and went up in 2010, from 111 kilotons to 148. This increase undoubtebly reflects the rebound in the global economy; as our overall emissions decrease shows, however, we believe it is possible to reduce our footprint while enjoying significant business growth. In fact, while our emissions from business flights went up in 2010, they were still lower than they were during their peak in 2007. We will continue to document our evolution and progress on a quarterly basis.

To continue toward our 2020 goal of reducing our emissions to their 2000 level in the most profitable way, we have set yearly reduction goals of 5%. Based on this calculation, our 2011 emissions target is 525 kilotons, though we are always working to produce the greatest reduction possible in any given year. (This 2011 target includes recent acquisitions of Sybase and TechniData.)

¹Our past GHG data is restated for two reasons: We have improved our measurement and we have updated the conversion factors for 2010 and previous years.

²Our yearly reduction goals required to reach 2000 levels of GHG emissions by 2020 including Sybase is adjusted to 4%.

Please see Explanatory Notes for more information

Independently Verified by KPMG