SAP isn’t the only enterprise software company with an official artificial intelligence ethics policy, but it’s one of the few that have included explicit criteria covering environmental considerations.

Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all published AI ethics policies, but none of them include criteria for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions despite their ambitious clean energy and emissions reduction strategies. Salesforce, like SAP, made environmental concerns part of a policy it first published in 2024, and IBM also includes them as part of its responsible technology governance.   

SAP was the first European technology company to form an AI advisory council in 2018: It published its first ethics guidelines three years later. The policy has been updated two times, most recently in June 2026.

The principles call for SAP employees to consider the company’s broader sustainability comments related to electricity use, water consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions before committing to adding AI into a product or service. AI should only be deployed “where it is relevant and delivers a tangible impact, avoiding unnecessary computational overhead,” the company advises.

“It’s about adding an additional moment to consider, Have all the possible consequences been thought of?” said Sophia Mendelsohn, chief sustainability and commercial officer at SAP.

AI is one of SAP’s most important strategic imperatives. The company plans at least $3 billion in related investments that will extend its core enterprise resource planning systems, used by close to 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That includes applications tailored for sustainability professionals, such as SAP Green Ledger, which uses transaction information to generate emissions metrics. 

Sustainability leaders have a limited opportunity to propose AI procurement criteria that will limit impact before these services become deeply embedded, Mendelsohn said.

“There’s a lot of corporate budget available right now that is not being filtered through the lens of sustainability,” she said. “All our organizations are in a race to find efficiency and growth through AI, and sustainability has to be part of that.”

SAP has adopted development and business practices that are intended to curb its energy consumption including:

• A push to use the smallest models or tools possible for a given feature or task
• Automation that routes queries to the most efficient AI models available
• A policy to match power consumption at company-owned data centers with renewable electricity

AI impact assessment

Every new AI project must undergo an assessment before it proceeds, according to SAP’s ethics policy.

That review includes scrutiny of the anticipated environmental impact, along with privacy and data considerations, human rights issues and potential societal impacts. Projects receive a risk ranking based on the results. Those with a high risk score are escalated to SAP’s ethics steering committee for further review.

The process provides clear guardrails that are visible to SAP’s stakeholders, including customers and employees. 

“SAP believes organizations will successfully deploy and adopt AI if the people inside organizations trust it enough to use it,” said Matthias Medert, global head of sustainability at SAP. “Hence, AI sustainability and AI ethics are closely interconnected questions rather than separate workstreams.”

Work in progress

Like other software companies, SAP is scrambling to gather emissions information from its partners. It has created resources to monitor and report on the impact of internal development work and infrastructure projects. 

SAP’s focus on hardware efficiency and its policy of creating smaller learning models helped the company reduce average emissions per AI token — the small bits of code that make up queries — by 60 percent between 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, the company said. 

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Race to Zero, an influential campaign that catalyzed support for net zero from thousand of large companies, is winding down as its leaders shift focus to delivery of climate commitments.

The initiative, which was launched in 2020 with backing from the United Nations, will be folded into the U.N.’s ongoing Global Climate Action Agenda, an effort to accelerate implementation of climate strategies over the second half of this decade.

“When we launched Race to Zero in 2020, the challenge was to mobilise campaign members around a shared, credible definition of net zero at scale – and they did, in the tens of thousands,” said Nigel Topping, a prominent climate leader who helped launch the campaign, in a statement announcing the move.

The campaign was also attacked for what critics saw as a deference to corporate interests and a lack of engagement with civil society.

Net zero promoter

Six years is a long time in corporate sustainability. When Race to Zero launched in 2020, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) was still more than a year away from publishing its first corporate net-zero standard. Yet close to 1,000 businesses, including Nestlé, Adobe and Diageo, became Race to Zero launch signatories by pledging to reach zero by 2050, publish plans for achieving that goal and set interim targets. The number of participating companies went on to more than double in the year after launch.

As it grew, Race to Zero tightened its criteria to reflect the evolving consensus around what constitutes a meaningful net-zero commitment. In 2022, for instance, the campaign said that signatories must publish a transition plan within a year of joining the campaign, extend net zero to all emission scopes and align lobbying activities with net zero. By that point, 7,000 companies had signed up.

Meanwhile, companies’ understanding of what it would take to hit net zero was developing — as was their awareness of how that might conflict with business imperatives. The 2022 update, for instance, required signatories to forgo developing or financing new coal projects. A few months later, Race to Zero began asking signatories only to “phase out” coal, with no end date specified. The change came after major banks said the original no-coal commitment might violate antitrust law, but climate activists cast the move as a retreat in the face of financial-sector lobbying.

The dispute over the coal language also shone a light on Race to Zero’s decision-making processes, which centered on a relatively small group of experts. The structure “creates scope for ambition but also opportunity for disruption by actors with competing missions,” argued a team of UK-based academics in a review of net zero guidelines published earlier this year.

Passing the baton

To be fair, Race to Zero was a campaign to generate commitments rather than an attempt to create a detail framework for the transition to net zero. Since the race launched, the latter gap has been filled by SBTi’s influential Corporate Net-Zero Standard, which was updated in June. A companion standard is also being developed by ISO, the international standards organization. Both rely on much broader stakeholder input.

Race to Zero succeeded in that it helped turn voluntary criteria into formal standards, argued Kaya Axelsson, an advisor to the campaign and researcher at the University of Oxford who helped author the review of net zero guidelines. “Now the next phase of the race is holding the line, keeping the standards and going beyond to do the systemic work that enables those things to happen,” she said.

That phase will be spearheaded by newly formed Net Zero Activation Group, which is due to be formally launched later this month. Organizations interested in participating can complete a form on the group’s homepage.

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Kering, the $14.5 billion French luxury company behind Gucci, Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta, has reduced its absolute greenhouse gas emissions by one-third since 2022. 

That includes a 4 percent decrease for direct operations and electricity, and a 28 percent cut for emissions related to land and agriculture, Kering reported in its impact report published in June. 

Crucial to this progress: a multi-year push to embrace recycled materials ranging from leather to plastic to precious metals alongside a transition to fibers sourced through regenerative agriculture.

This work is guided by insights from Kering’s environmental profit and loss (EP&L) accounting system, which catalogs its impacts on nature, including emissions, water use, waste, land use and pollution. The annual EP&L statement was created in 2014 to guide and prioritize decarbonization decisions. For example, raw materials production and processing account for 63 percent of its emissions; manufacturing contributes another 8 percent. Hence the deep focus on these levers.

“Governance is key because if sustainability is not at the right level, and you don’t have the right governance to manage sustainability, it’s only a word because the real sustainability is really to change the business model and continue to develop our business for the long run,” said Marie-Claire Daveu, chief sustainability and institutional affairs officer at Kering.

Daveu is one of the longest-tenured corporate sustainability leaders in any industry, hired in 2012 after a stint in the French government. She reports to Kering CEO Luca de Meo.

Centralized purchasing

Kering employs individuals fully dedicated to sustainability strategy, but each brand has its own champions to reflect individual priorities. That said, the company is coordinating purchases across groups to scale alternative materials.

For example, Kering has used a central purchasing program since 2017 to buy gold that is either certified as recycled or from artisanal mines recognized for Fairtrade or Fairmined practices.

Similarly, it launched the Kering Accelerator for Regenerative Materials in 2024 to scale purchases of cotton, wool and cashmere sourced from land cultivated using regenerative farming practices. 

Kering pre-reserves orders for these fibers, which gives growers more economic stability. The program has improved traceability: Kering can trace at least 98 percent of these materials back to their country of origin. A similar program for leather is being launched this year.

Low-carbon and recycled materials

Kering uses both a corporate-level and brand-centric approach to embracing innovations that lower the emissions of its products. The company’s Material Innovation Lab in Milan, for example, has identified more than 600 manufacturers that provide lower-impact options for designers to use, according to Kering.

Kering Ventures, launched in 2019, is the company’s vehicle for investing in potential new suppliers. Two examples are VitroLabs and Sqim, which are pioneering alternatives to leather sourced from animals.

University collaborations are also instrumental for scaling research and for encouraging next-generation designers to view recycled or previously used materials as a canvas for innovation, Daveu said. 

Kering has helped develop curriculum for institutions including HEC Paris, London College of Fashion, Parsons School of Design, National University of Singapore and Tsinghua University, among others.

Circular future

Like many other fashion houses, Kering encourages resale of its products through certified marketplaces. It owns a 5 percent stake in Vestiaire Collective, which specializes in luxury goods. 

“When you restart a new life for products, we think it’s a good example of where sustainability and luxury go hand in hand,” Daveu said. “It’s not only an environmental topic. It’s a social advantage because you can sell quality products to younger people, to a generation that may not be able to buy new products.”

Gucci has taken the lead in Kering’s work related to materials reuse through its “Circular Hub” in Tuscany in Italy. Its goal is to promote shared research, facilitate the development of new supply chains and logistics networks, and train designers and industrial partners to embrace these principles at the beginning of a product’s life cycle.   

For example, Kering encourages designers to think about how to construct new products so they can be disassembled or repaired more easily. If materials are damaged during that process, they’re harder to reuse in a luxury product.

“It’s very important to be sure that designers understand how much it’s key, and that they don’t see sustainability as a constraint but more as a way to stimulate creativity,” Daveu said. 

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AstraZeneca and Amgen are among the winners of a competition that demonstrates how gamification can motivate companies and employees to tackle sustainability challenges.

The two pharma giants were among more than 4,000 laboratories and close to 270 organizations that saved a total of almost 30 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy by changing the way they operate and maintain freezers that store biological samples.

Labs cut energy by setting freezers at slightly higher temperatures — minus 70 degrees Celsius rather than the industry standard of minus 80 degrees, a change that has no impact on most samples — and ensuring that freezer components are properly maintained. 

These steps can have meaningful impacts because lab freezers are “pretty significant energy hogs,” said James Connelly, CEO of My Green Lab, which runs the 2026 Freezer Challenge and other initiatives designed to make laboratories more sustainable. A single ultra-low temperature freezer can use as much energy as two American homes, he estimated. (Raising the temperature of food storage freezers can also produce useful savings.)

Amgen won the Top Organization Award by saving an average of 5,314 kWh per day during the first half of 2026, with U.K.-based AstraZeneca notching up daily savings of 5,244 kWh, earning it the Winning Streak Award for repeated high performance in the challenge, which launched in 2017. Siemens Healthineers, which operates in Canada, Ireland and the U.S., was named Top Organization in the hospital category, and the U.K.’s Institute of Cancer Research scooped the academic section.

Gamification hack

Gamifying the energy savings is “one of the hacks we use to drive impact,” said Connelly. “So much of sustainability these days is doom and gloom and compliance,” he noted. Adding the awards and recognition pushes teams to do something that is already in their interest — saving energy and, thus, money — but which they might not otherwise act on.

Sustainability professionals often say that company rankings can motivate C-suites and boards to fund projects, even if the competitions offer kudos rather than cash to winners. Influential competitions elsewhere in sustainability include CDP’s Corporate A List, which recognizes companies that score highly for environmental transparency; the EPA’s Green Power Partnership National Top 100, which ranks companies by clean power purchases (its status under the current U.S. administration is unclear); and the Global 100 list from media and research organization Corporate Knights.

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Vacation itineraries and long flights have a way of making room for fiction. Climate fiction has quietly become one of publishing’s most inventive corners, turning environmental anxiety into some of the most talked-about stories. The genre has grown considerably in recent years, racking up Booker Prizes, National Book Award nods and even its own dedicated accolade (The Climate Fiction Prize). Here are nine of our favorites to take along this summer.

‘The Mountain in the Sea‘

By Ray Nayler

In this Locus Award-winning debut, a team of scientists studies a newly discovered, highly intelligent octopus species off a remote island. Their find forces a reckoning with just how much humanity owes the natural world — and with a corporation racing to exploit it. Nayler, a former international advisor to the NOAA on marine sanctuaries, brings real expertise in ocean conservation to the novel. It’s science fiction, but its questions about corporate power and environmental ethics feel increasingly relevant as companies face growing scrutiny over their impact on the natural world.

‘Orbital‘

By Samantha Harvey

This book follows six astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as they circle Earth 16 times in a single day, watching sunrise and sunset reprise beneath them. Harvey has said that watching live footage from the ISS left her overwhelmed by the beauty and strangeness of our planet, a feeling she distills in this 2024 Booker Prize winner. The slim, meditative volume is a thoughtful reminder of just how intertwined our environmental and social systems are.

‘The Actual Star‘

By Monica Byrne

This novel weaves together three settings a thousand years apart (ancient Maya, contemporary Belize and a far-future world reshaped by climate catastrophe), tracing how societies adapt or collapse under pressure. New Scientist called it “a stone-cold masterpiece,” and it drew similar praise from The Guardian. Its long, telescoping view of climate and civilization makes it especially compelling for sustainability professionals who sometimes think in decades and centuries as much as in fiscal quarters.

‘All the Water in the World‘

By Eiren Caffall

Set in a flooded future New York, this debut follows a girl with a “deep feeling for water” as she and her family shelter on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History, trying to preserve fragments of human history and culture as a superstorm bears down. A Library Journal review termed it “incandescent,” and Scientific American praised its tense, gripping momentum. It’s a compelling read for sustainability professionals thinking through climate risk and community resilience.

‘The Wall‘

By John Lanchester

In this near-future novel, longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, a coastal nation has sealed itself off behind a concrete wall to keep out rising seas and the refugees they have displaced. New recruit Joseph Kavanagh is assigned to defend a stretch of the wall and soon discovers that everything is not as it seems, forcing him to grapple with ethical dilemmas that may feel familiar: the price others pay for our safety, the way environmental change redraws borders and more. 

‘Bewilderment‘

By Richard Powers

After his wife’s death, an astrobiologist searching for signs of life on distant planets struggles to reach his environmentally anxious young son back on Earth. Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, the novel comes from Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers, whom The Guardian has praised for his “extraordinary gifts as a writer.” At its core, this is a novel about loss, grief and hope, offering a more personal lens on environmental change.

‘A Children’s Bible‘

By Lydia Millet

Set during what starts as an ordinary summer vacation, this novel follows a group of children who watch escalating climate disasters unfold while the adults around them stay determinedly, drunkenly indifferent. A finalist for the National Book Award, it was described by Kirkus as “a bleak and righteously angry tale determined to challenge our rationalizations about climate change.” Millet blends dark satire with real urgency, imagining what happens when leadership fails and the people written off as powerless have to step up instead.

‘The Light Pirate‘

By Lily Brooks-Dalton

Spanning several decades as rising seas slowly submerge Florida, this novel follows one woman’s life as the coastline — and the society built along it — is remade around her. A Good Morning America Book Club pick, it was praised by Kirkus for creating “an all-too-believable picture of nature reclaiming Florida from its human inhabitants.” Rather than dwelling only on catastrophe, Brooks-Dalton is just as interested in what people build back up, making the novel a study of resilience and adaptation as well as of loss.

‘Hum‘

By Helen Phillips

Set in a near-future city reshaped by artificial intelligence and environmental decline, this book follows a mother who alters her own face to evade surveillance, then watches automation reshape her family’s life. The novel won the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize and landed on year-end best-of lists from the New York Times and The New Yorker. It’s a sharp and unsettling read for anyone grappling with how technology and climate are converging to remake ordinary life.

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