This new framework measures corporate chemical footprints

The Safer Chemistry Impact Fund (SCI Fund), an initiative backed by Google and Apple, has released a framework that companies can tap to measure chemicals used in their products and supply chains, flag potential hazards and track progress in addressing them.

Called the Safer Chemistry Impact Metrics Framework, it was developed by experts from corporations, nonprofits, investors and government agencies. The framework’s principles were tested by companies in the beauty and personal care, apparel and footwear, and consumer electronics industries, but they are not sector-specific.

The work was motivated by the Global Framework on Chemicals, which, adopted in September 2023 at the fifth International Conference on Chemicals Management, sets guidelines for addressing planetary and human health concerns associated with the entire chemical life cycle. Though not binding, it did set expectations.     

The Safer Chemistry Impact Framework provides ways to catalogue chemical hazards, identify areas where companies need more information and create chemical footprint profiles. It’s an open architecture that can be plugged into existing chemicals management processes.

For example, it helps companies map the percentage of chemicals they use that fall into the “chemicals of concern” category — those that carry persistent, known risks to humans or the environment — versus those verified as safer alternatives.

The hope is to turn the framework into a recognized standard akin to those that measure greenhouse gas emissions. That process will begin in early 2027, SCI Fund officials said.

“We recognize that we need to formalize this further,” said Rachel Simon, senior manager of safer chemistry collaboratives for nonprofit ChemForward, an SCI Fund partner. 

ChemForward manages the Chemical Hazard Data Trust, a repository of hazard assessments rating commonly used chemicals on 24 human and environmental impacts. Companies funding its work include Google, HP and Sephora.

Editor’s note: This story was updated Aug. 19 to clarify ChemForward’s current funders.

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Kimberly-Clark turns away from ‘natural’ trees to make toilet paper

Two years after making a “natural forest-free” paper sourcing commitment, Kimberly-Clark is building a manufacturing plant to scale its use of hesperaloe, one of 70 regenerative natural fibers it has tabbed as an alternative to wood pulp.

The consumer products company hasn’t declared a deadline for its “natural forest-free” pledge — beyond saying it will be after 2030 — but it achieved a 50 percent reduction in fiber use from natural forests in 2025 compared with a 2011 baseline, according to its 2025 sustainability report. 

Kimberly-Clark’s definition of “natural forests” encompasses old-growth trees and those that naturally generate, mostly in boreal or temperate climates. The company used pulp certified under Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) guidelines for 77 percent of its virgin fiber purchases. 

But, while FSC-certified sources will make up the bulk of the company’s purchases for some time, it is also betting on hesperaloe, a low-water succulent that is native to the southwest United States. 

Kimberley-Clark is building a facility in Yuma, Arizona, to scale the supply of hesperaloe available for its toilet paper, tissues, diapers and feminine hygiene products, which it sells under the Scott, Kleenex, Huggies and Kotex brands.

“While testing continues, we are optimistic about early results and believe this material will provide curve-bending performance in our products while strengthening our long-term growth and supply chain resilience and accelerating our journey toward a future less dependent on traditional fiber sources,” said Craig Slavtcheff, chief research and development officer at Kimberly-Clark.

The company is also developing alternative sources using fiber from wheat straw, sugar cane and sorghum, among other plants. It has spent roughly $250 million over the past decade on research.

“This is just the beginning but signals a potentially market-shifting breakthrough,” said Shelley Vinyard, director of global nature at the Natural Resources Defense Council, “If Kimberly-Clark can scale up production of this fiber sustainably and without displacing other native ecosystems, this could alleviate significant pressure on the forests currently used to make tissue products.”

Smaller hygiene product brands are already leaning into alternative fiber sources. One example: Paddy Paper, which launches Aug. 25 and uses leftover straw from rice, the world’s third-largest food crop. Presently, an estimated 220 billion pounds of rice straw are burned annually.

The big consumer products companies have been slower to embrace new sources. P&G talks up its forest certification initiatives and has tested limited bamboo versions of its products. More recently, it committed another $20 million to finding non-wood fiber alternatives. Georgia Pacific uses bast fibers including hemp and jute, although not for its bathroom tissue lines.

Other progress

In addition to its 2025 paper sourcing milestone, Kimberly-Clark said it cut the absolute greenhouse gas emissions from its operations (Scope 1) and purchased electricity (Scope 2) by 46 percent since its 2015 baseline year, well on the way to the 50 percent reduction it has pledged to meet by 2030. These categories account for roughly 30 percent of the company’s overall emissions.

The footprint of indirect activities (Scope 3) was reduced by 16 percent. Kimberly-Clark’s target for 2030 is 20 percent for emissions from two Scope 3 categories: purchased goods and services, and end-of-life treatment of sold products.

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Apply now for the Trellis 30 Under 30 climate leaders 2026

The annual Trellis 30 Under 30 list honors individuals who have made a specific, direct, measurable impact by addressing climate change through their professional roles.

Since 2016, we’ve recognized 300 innovators and trailblazers for accomplishments related to carbon removal, the circular economy, climate tech, ESG communications, finance, industrial decarbonization, low-carbon materials, nature, renewable energy and more.

Take Marlies Michielssen with Amazon, who has identified water replenishment projects to restore hundreds of millions of liters annually in water-stressed regions. Or Mathew Lee at MSCI, a researcher who helps the world’s largest investors answer “why sustainability matters” for their portfolios. And Clausell Stokes, who co-founded the Ceres working group on sustainable and resilient agriculture, which includes the likes of McDonald’s, Nestlé and Keurig Dr Pepper. 

Those are just three of the young leaders recognized in 2025. 

Now, we’re ready to add our 2026 cohort.

How it works

The Trellis content team evaluates applicants based on their recent contributions as part of their professional employment.

Qualifications: 

  • Nominees must be 30 years or younger as of Oct. 1, 2026. 
  • Applications must be received by Sept. 11.
  • Nominees must have driven specific, quantifiable impact while working for a company or organization (not while a student).
  • The climate work must be recent, having taken place between 2024 and 2026.
  • Selections will prioritize corporate climate and sustainability professionals.

Evaluation criteria:

  • Leadership exemplified, by influencing specific business outcomes.
  • Measurable impact in addressing climate change. Numbers matter. (Examples: Quantified the company’s Scope 3 supply chain emissions, making up 80 percent of its CO2 footprint; Conducted due diligence for ESG investment portfolios with more than $1 billion in assets under management; Closed a $10 million Series A fundraising round for a climate startup.)

The 2026 30 Under 30 class will be announced in October; those selected will be contacted before the end of September.

Submit an application before the Sept. 11 deadline.

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For B2B companies, certifications lose their power in turbulent times like these

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis or its editors.

Social and environmental certifications (e.g., fair trade, organic, recyclable) create commercial lift in calm markets. Unfortunately, today’s world is anything but calm, and recent research has found that when markets are turbulent, certifications aren’t the way to drive revenue. 

To be sure, certifications offer non-revenue-generating benefits, including internal operational discipline, commitment signals to regulators and investors, and a baseline verification mechanism that can matter for compliance. But when it comes to B2B sales, this is a good time to rethink how much you lean on certifications.

The evidence

In a 2025 article in Industrial Marketing Management, Marcel Aksoy and Benedikt Schnellbächer ran a controlled scenario experiment with 655 German business professionals. They tested three ways of framing sustainability for a purchasing audience: monetization (financial return, cost reduction), certification (third-party verified standards), and risk reduction (exposure, resilience, downside protection). Certification and risk framings were evaluated alongside a no-frame control, under both low and high market turbulence.

Each frame outperformed no frame at all (I’ll come back to this later). Their effectiveness, though, diverged sharply as turbulence rose.

Under calm conditions, certification had a statistically significant effect on purchasing decisions. Under high turbulence, it didn’t. Risk framing was the reverse: insignificant at low levels of turbulence, a notable benefit at high ones.

Why certifications lose their benefit

When buyers experience turbulence, their priorities and behavior change. A 2022 study by Leff Bonney, Lisa Beeler and Nawar N. Chaker in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management found post-COVID buyers reporting greater formalization of purchasing, less openness to new providers and a greater reliance on incumbents, with risk reduction as the chief reason.

As one of the purchasing managers they interviewed put it: “It’s all about hedging risk for us, and that’s why we are doing this. I think that our previous decision-making processes focused on cost reductions mainly around unit price of products being sourced and occasionally on labor savings. But now, we have to factor in risk.” 

This pattern is echoed across different roles and timeframes. For example, it appears in what sustainability professionals say about themselves today, according to Deloitte’s 2026 CSO Benchmarking Survey. The results show “a clear focus on ‘defensive,’ bottom-line activities. Most CSOs are using sustainability to protect value by boosting efficiency (76 percent) and managing risks (76 percent).”

In other words, in turbulent times, a focus on risk crowds out other factors, including your credentials. Fundamentally, from the buyer’s perspective: Certification is about you. Risk framing is about them.

What works instead

“Here is how this reduces your exposure” lands harder in volatile markets, when buyers are in a downside-management mode, because that framing meets buyers where they are.

Monetization showed the strongest overall effect against the no-frame control (although, unlike certification and risk, it wasn’t tested against different turbulence levels, so we can’t compare results under various conditions). Framing sustainability in terms of financial return, ROI or measurable cost reduction consistently moved purchase decisions. (Disclosure: Monetization of sustainability’s benefits is what we do at Valutus, so I may be biased toward this result. So don’t take my word for it; test monetization with your own audiences.) 

The implication for practitioners is clear: Analyze your market conditions before deciding what to lead with. Certification can be part of the story in calm markets, In turbulent ones, it lags behind risk.

Now is the time

SBTi and ISO have both recently updated their net zero standards, forcing practitioners to articulate what their certifications actually mean to buyers, investors and internal stakeholders. That moment of scrutiny is an opportunity. 

The question “What is our certification actually doing for our commercial relationships?” is easy to skip during a period of assumed consensus. But that’s not where we are. 

The credential doesn’t change with the market. But the buyer does, and your message should too.

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Activist short-seller targets environmental failings

A new activist investment fund that focuses exclusively on environmental issues has touted its first success after targeting a company that provides emissions-intensive electricity generation to data centers.

Sunlight Partners’ report, released in May, singled out Babcock & Wilcox (B&W), a manufacturer with close to 160 years of experience with steam boiler technology that recently announced deals to power data centers.

B&W’s stock fell 13 percent in the week following the report, which alleged that the company’s proposed projects were unlikely to be built, and that, in any event, its technology was inefficient and outdated. In a second-quarter summary released last month, Sunlight, which bet on B&W’s stock declining, said the fall had driven its own 12 percent return.

B&W did not respond to a request for comment. Its stock, which was priced at $19.65 when the report was released, is currently trading at $9.35.

As is often the case, it is likely that more than one factor pushed down that price; the stocks of other AI-related companies also declined over the same period, noted Will Funnell, a former options trader who co-founded the fund. But B&W underperformed relative to the trend, he said.

Environmental targets

Sunlight, which is based in Brisbane, Australia, plans on releasing between six and eight reports annually, said Funnell. The targets will be companies it believes are guilty of greenwashing, excessive waste or other environmental sins, with a focus on less diversified firms for which attacks on an important line of business can have bigger impacts. 

This short-selling approach contrasts with that of activist funds that try to increase stock prices by pressuring companies to reform. “We’re looking more for the worst actors,” said Funnell. 

He declined to state the value of the fund, but said that he was in talks over what would be its first major institutional investment. “We think this fund scales up to $200 million, and we still have considerable headroom,” he added.

Impact alignment

Sunlight says that it aims to generate environmental impact alongside returns to investors, but the two are not necessarily aligned.

Like all short-sellers, Sunlight will need its campaigns to have an immediate impact, noted Mark DesJardine, an expert in shareholder activism at Dartmouth College. It’s possible that the fund will exit a short position and achieve its financial aims before the target company commits to changes, thus leaving the fund’s environmental goals in doubt.

“It’s a relatively rare strategy to play because when we think about transforming a firm’s business model to get into more environmentally friendly businesses, that’s typically something that plays out over years, not over weeks and months,” said DesJardine.

Still, the fund can generate environmental benefits even if changing company practice is not something it can claim to compel, argued Funnell. “What we do is put information into the market that revises expectations,” he said. “Revised expectations inform investment decisions, which in turn affect environmental outcomes.”

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Sustainable AI: Tools, frameworks and best practices in 2026

Sustainability professionals are scrambling to understand how AI adoption will impact environmental goals. This tracker covers the latest resources for measuring and taming the technology’s impact on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, freshwater and other concerns.

Check out the new arrivals directly below, or click to jump to a specific category.

This list will be updated regularly. If you’d like to suggest an item for inclusion, email [email protected].

New arrivals

Check out this tool for comparing AI vendor emissions (Added Aug. 17, 2026)
Greenpixie, a U.K. startup with flagship customers including Mastercard and Unilever, has launched a free edition of its service for comparing the emissions of leading AI models. The company also offers free courses for professionals interested in adopting “green ops” practices for AI workflows. 

Gather energy ratings for widely used AI models (Aug. 17, 2026)
AI Energy Score, hosted by open source software site Hugging Face, calculates electricity use by AI models and ranks them on efficiency. The resource, created in partnership with Salesforce, is designed to help developers make more informed decisions about the code they use and to guide procurement teams concerned about emissions. 

What to ask enterprise AI software vendors (Aug. 17, 2026)
Little is known about the greenhouse gas emissions or freshwater withdrawals linked to the infrastructure used by leading AI companies. That will change if more corporations request the information during contract negotiations, argues the Business Council on Climate Change. The council has published sample questions and contract language to get sustainability teams started.

Understand Why SAP screens AI for environmental criteria (Aug. 12, 2026)
Cloud software companies including Amazon, Google and Microsoft have AI ethics policies, but SAP is one of the few with explicit environmental criteria. The developer has adopted practices to curb AI energy consumption, such as using smaller models. It also assesses the potential energy and emissions impact of every new project.

Learn how Salesforce discloses AI emissions (July 22, 2026)
Relationship management software firm Salesforce has added information about energy consumption and emissions to the fact sheets it publishes on its machine learning models. The information covers both training and use of the models.  

How to measure AI emissions

Watch this open AI standards group (Added Aug. 17, 2026)
Lightspeed corporate adoption has resulted in fragmented approaches for managing tokens, the data chunks read and processed by large language models. Enter the Tokenomics Foundation, backed by Accenture, IBM and others, which aims to create open frameworks for measuring cost, energy and other economic metrics.

Estimate the footprint of AI video production (Aug. 17, 2026)
A few seconds of AI-generated video can use at least 1,000 times more energy than a chatbot prompt. Consulting firm Sustainable AI Group has developed an open-source resource that estimates the energy consumption of such content. The work is supported by the GenAI Footprint Alliance, led by French advertising and public relations giant Publicis.

Explore one way to handle AI carbon accounting (Aug. 3, 2026)
Carbon management software firm Watershed has published what it describes as a “defensible starting point” from which companies can calculate emissions related to AI use. The nascent methodology suggests that teams base calculations on tokens, the small bits of text that make up AI prompts. 

Keep tabs on emissions from 8 top data center operators (July 27, 2026)
The Data Center Air Pollution Tracker ranks big tech companies — Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Meta Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI — by use of behind-the-meter natural gas generators and the electricity mix on local grids. A perfect score is 100, but none of the companies rates higher than 70.   

How to limit AI emissions

Inside Okta’s AI strategy (Added May 26, 2026)
Okta’s sustainability team collaborated with engineering and information technology strategists on guidelines for when employees should use AI. The recommendations define the identity software firm’s future disclosure plans and encourage use of models with the lightest energy consumption.     

Gitlab’s rules for AI usage (May 18, 2026)
Gitlab, maker of coding tools used by most Fortune 500 companies, has adopted guidelines for what AI vendors should disclose in contracts. The company’s sustainability team also created an AI tool that screens requests for proposals to understand customer concerns regarding AI emissions.  

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Citi refines $1 trillion ‘sustainable finance’ pledge

Citi has dedicated close to $650 billion to its goal of investing or lending $1 trillion in “sustainable finance” by 2030.

That puts the third-largest U.S. bank further along, by percentage, than its bigger rivals, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, both of which announced similar commitments early this decade.

JPMorgan Chase had deployed less than one-third of its $1 trillion-by-2030 target, as of its latest sustainability report in October 2025. Bank of America, the first to issue corporate green bonds, had committed about half of its $1.5 trillion goal, as of December 2025.

“Sustainable-finance commitments matter because banks have enormous influence over which technologies and industries can raise capital at scale, and there is a real need for far more investment in clean energy and other climate solutions,” said Ben Cushing, director of the sustainable finance campaign at environmental nonprofit Sierra Club. “But whether a bank is on track to hit a self-defined financing goal is not the same as whether its overall business is aligned with the energy transition and the need to mitigate the climate crisis.”

Broad definition

All three banks include community development and social projects as part of their sustainable finance pledges, which span many environmental and social categories. 

Of the $91.3 billion committed to sustainable finance by Citi in 2025, for example, $7.3 billion supports programs for affordable housing and economic inclusion, according to its 2025 report. 

Climate resilience investments are becoming more common. Citi was the financing agent for a $330 million bond issued by Tokyo for climate adaptation and resilience projects.  

Citi formally merged the separate frameworks it previously followed for green, social and affordable housing into a unified set of sustainable finance criteria published in December 2025, because many projects overlap. 

Among other things, the new framework broadens Citi’s interpretation of “sustainable finance” to include nuclear energy and nature-based solutions. Citi’s new AI Infrastructure banking team, tasked with backing energy-efficient data centers, will also factor against the target. 

Key metric: ‘avoided emissions’

The bulk of Citi’s sustainable finance funds are linked to specific projects or infrastructure initiatives meant to reduce or “avoid” greenhouse gas emissions compared with traditional approaches. The two biggest investment categories in 2025 were renewable energy (20 percent of all financing, or $18.4 billion) and sustainable transportation (11 percent, or $10.3 billion). 

Citi calculates emissions related to sustainable investments using methods developed by the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials, a nonprofit that helps financial institutions disclose the environmental impact of their financing. Citi estimates that renewable energy projects it has funded, for example, have avoided emissions of more than 8.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. (The data isn’t independently verified.)  

The vast majority of Citi’s funds were allocated by its investment banking division: $65.7 billion in 2025, and 84 percent of the cumulative investment. Close to half of the financing came in the form of green or sustainability-linked bonds, as well as other debt.

Tricky balance

Aside from the sustainable finance target, Citi has pledged to achieve net-zero emissions for its investment portfolio by 2050. That’s despite the collapse in late 2025 of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, which Citi left in late 2024.

The bank’s interim 2030 goals are intended to reduce the relative carbon intensity of its financing commitments across 10 major sectors: aluminum, aviation, auto manufacturing, cement, commercial real estate, energy, power, shipping, steel and thermal coal mining. Citi’s recent report doesn’t include progress against those goals; the latest data, in Citi’s 2024 climate report, shows mixed progress.

Citi also publishes a disclosure that covers energy supply investments, including a ratio of low-carbon energy financing to that dedicated to fossil fuels. The bank still commits more than twice as much annually to the latter category.

Citi invested $45.3 billion into the fossil fuels sector in 2025, according to the 2026 “Banking on Climate Chaos” report, an annual ranking produced by environmental nonprofits including Banktrack, Rainforest Alliance and Sierra Club. JPMorgan topped that list.

“The real measure of progress for banks like Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America is whether they are actually shifting capital at the scale and pace needed toward a cleaner, more resilient energy system while moving away from financing continued fossil-fuel expansion,” Cushing said.

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Why industrial-scale food waste processing is booming

Data from a new facility for generating renewable natural gas shows how industrial-scale processing of food waste is experiencing a growth spurt.

The Turlock, California, facility is a recent addition to a portfolio of 14 maintained by Divert, a food-waste processor founded in 2007. Multiple new facilities deploying similar approaches have opened around the U.S. as state mandates, cost pressures and emissions reduction goals prompt companies to look for alternatives to landfill disposal.

One company that sends expired or otherwise unwanted food to Turlock is United States Cold Storage (USCS), which operates 40 warehouses around the country. The two companies said this week that Divert had processed 2.5 million pounds of unsold food and beverages from seven USCS warehouses in California over the past 15 months.

Partnerships like that helped the Turlock facility and Divert’s other operations generate enough natural gas to heat close to 3,000 homes for a year and avoid the emissions of more than 140,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2025.

Cost savings

Paying Divert to process unsold food makes sense purely from a cost perspective because the transport fees are lower than those of haulers, said Henry Lewis, a sustainability specialist at USCS. Because Divert’s processing avoids methane release from landfills and displaces production of fossil natural gas, USCS and its food-industry customers also lower their Scope 3 emissions.

When the pallets of food reach Turlock, Divert’s depackaging machinery breaks open any containers and separates packaging waste. The organic slurry that remains is sent to a digester, which uses bacteria to break it down into fertilizer and natural gas, which is piped into the regional grid.

The technology is well established, but multiple forces have been driving its proliferation. These include organic diversion mandates in California and other states, which require businesses to help keep organic waste out of landfills. (Although researchers have contested the impact of such regulation.) 

In addition to the emissions savings, new business models are also playing a part: Divert’s customers, including Kroger and other large retailers, benefit from a vertically integrated process that generates valuable data on where waste originates. “We have thousands of bins that are coming into our facilities every day,” said Ben Kuethe Oaks, senior vice president for commercial at Divert. Each bin has an RFID label on it, he adds, so the company can track how much comes from a particular store.

Industry growth

Divert is adding two more grid-connected natural gas facilities this year, and its competitors are also growing. These include Denali, which processed just over 1 million tons of food waste in 2024, up from 850,000 tons the year prior. Unlike its rival, Denali focuses on collection and processing; natural gas production is handled by its partners. Another notable competitor, Vanguard Renewables, originally focused on anaerobic digesters but is now expanding into waste collection.

The use of large-scale food waste processing is backed by food waste advocacy groups such as ReFED. But industry observers also raise questions about the approach. Processing of waste falls below prevention in hierarchies for waste management, for instance. Critics also note that adding natural gas to the grid could prolong the use of the fossil fuel. 

Large centralized facilities can also make waste processing systems more brittle and prone to disruption, which can occur when plastic packaging contaminates digesters. “When you build facilities that can take 100,000-200,000 tons a year of food waste feedstock, you are putting all your eggs in one basket,” said Nora Goldstein, editorial chairperson of Biocycle, an industry publication. “There’s a vulnerability to that aggregation.”

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Why SAP screens every AI project for ethical and environmental risks

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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Shareholders continue to pull back on environmental resolutions

The number of shareholder resolutions focused on environmental issues continues to decline, according to a review of proposals filed during the first half of 2026. It’s now two years since shareholders at a large company voted in favor of an environmental resolution, researchers at business think tank The Conference Board found.

Seventy-five environmental proposals have been filed in 2026 by shareholders at Russell 3000 companies, which include the largest U.S. businesses by market capitalization. That’s half the number filed over the same period in 2025. Most large companies hold their annual meetings and vote on shareholder proposals during the first half of the year.

Environmental shareholder proposals at Russell 3000 companies

Source: The Conference Board.

Broader trends

The decline in proposals lessens the pressure on companies to act on sustainability, particularly those that have made little progress to date. One of the proposals that passed in 2024, for example, prompted fast-food chain Jack in the Box to set its first targets for greenhouse gas reductions.

The drop in environmental proposals slightly outpaced the overall decline in shareholder proposals, which fell to 622 in 2026 from 923 in 2024, the board found. Anti-ESG groups filed 102 of those proposals, a number that’s been roughly flat since 2024. No proposal from an anti-ESG group has succeeded in the past three years.

The Conference Board carried out the research in collaboration with data provider ESGAUGE, leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates and the Rutgers Center for Corporate Law and Governance. 

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