Greentech Lead America: SAP announced it will join the Livelihoods Fund, a carbon investment fund, with an investment of EUR 3 million.
The Livelihoods Fund is formed with the goal to create social value for rural communities and contribute to their food security through the restoration of their ecosystems.
Piloted by Danone in 2008, Livelihoods Fund supports projects that link carbon sequestration, restore biodiversity and fight poverty. This platform allows common investment business partners to pool their resources and skills together, to support their shared vision for social responsibility.
“This investment supports our vision of helping the world run better by improving people lives,” said Peter Graf, chief sustainability officer, SAP. “It confirms our sustainability commitment of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to the level of year-2000 by the year 2020, representing a decrease of more than 50 percent.”
SAP to date, has achieved a reduction of 18 percent and avoided cost in excess of more than EUR 220 million over the last four years, according to Graf.
SAP’s carbon reduction strategy is based on three pillars: Accelerate the profitable reduction of energy consumption by SAP, enhance the purchase of green electricity (currently at 67 percent globally) and offset part of its emissions in an innovative way.
“SAP is executing across all three pillars to achieve our target reduction,” said Peter Rasper, executive vice president of Global Finance Infrastructure, SAP, and SAP representative on the board of directors of Livelihoods Fund.
“Through our partnership with the Livelihoods Fund, SAP will not only purchase carbon credits and offset emissions, but we will produce carbon credits,” Rasper added. “This provides an innovative, affordable and partnership-oriented way to reduce our emissions that will once again underline our leadership in the sustainability space.”
Livelihoods Fund has so far invested in several large-scale projects in Africa and Asia.
Bernard Giraud, co-founder of Livelihoods Fund and president of Livelihoods Venture, the Fund Advisor, said, “We welcome SAP’s engagement on reducing its carbon footprint while contributing to create social and environmental value through an innovative business model. And we expect that they will also bring a lot to the Livelihoods approach.”
Despite a decrease in emissions by two percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 compared to 2011, SAP missed its 2012 emissions target of 480 kilotons, according to the preliminary sustainability results for 2012.
While driving considerable business growth (non-IFRS software and cloud subscriptions revenue increased 17 percent at constant currencies), the company stayed flat in total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, coming in at 490 kilotons carbon dioxide emissions.
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