Disclaimer: I’m an SAP employee.
Eventually, the two main topics of my professional career get together with SAP’s approach to sustainability. On the one hand the environmental management topics familiar since the study of environmental sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, on the other hand SAP as an employer of choice who encourages personal development, gives a tremendous amount of degrees of freedom to his employees, and offers a flexible workplace. This was about the “What”-dimension of sustainability which seems to be shared by most of the voters on the current SAP Vote on Sustainability (see also the vote results).
Moreover from a knowledge manager’s point of view, I’m glad that SAP encourages the 2.0-kind of interactions with its stakeholders (see the new Sustainability Report collaborative workspace).
Anyway, what do the figures in the report mean? Let’s take one example: the close to 400,000 metric tons of overall global carbon dioxide emissions by SAP employees (incl. business travel and car fleet) in 2007. The absolute number corresponds to the carbon dioxide emissions of the country of Bhutan. If you divide these emissions by the 44,000 employees you get about 9.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per SAP employee. This corresponds to the average emission by a citizen of South Africa. The ratio of GDP (aka revenue) per metric ton of carbon dioxide emission is about 33 for SAP (excellent in comparison with countries).
Thank you, James Farrar (see also SUN’s blog on Corporate Social Responsibility).

Sponsoring a child is another nice way of connecting people with people. The following points have convinced us to take part in the activities of Plan International:

• our daughters establish a relationship with a child in a totally different part of the world (Assitan lives in Mali – a fantastic country that I got to know back in 1997)
• the funds benefit the whole community in which the child lives
• Plan is a transparent organization

Surprise of the day: while I was walking with my daughter to the kindergarten we saw a stork couple flying over our heads in the red light of the sunrise. Damn, 23 January and the storks are back from their wintering grounds… It seems not to be a singular case (e.g. newspaper article). So, they are back and send a signal: our climate changes.
And I am back to blogging and send a signal: my life has changed…

“Sunshines replaces snow in Alps” headlines the English edition of the ‘Neue Zürcher Zeitung’ newspaper today. Climate change was one of the most important topics in 2006 (it received more than 88 millions hits with Google during the last year; that’s 6 millions more hits than “information management”, 15 millions more hits than “George W. Bush”, 38 millions more hits than “knowledge management”, and 41 millions more hits than “stock exchange” – based on searches with www.google.de).
What can an ordinary man like me do to mitigate the “inconvenient truth”? One way is to offset the environmental impact of emissions from air travel by purchasing a ‘myclimate’ ticket. ‘Myclimate‘ is a spin-off from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich which invests its funds in carbon offset projects that lead to a direct reduction of greenhouse gases; e.g. electricity from biomass in India. I bought one ticket to offset my family and my collective 12.528 km of air travel in 2006. When will you buy your own ‘myclimate’ ticket?