Climate Week Highlights: How Data and Tech Drive Corporate Sustainability

Welcome to a special edition of the Climate Confident Podcast. In this episode, I sit down with Jim Sullivan, Global Head of Product Management for Sustainability at SAP. With three decades of experience in sustainability and climate change—including roles at the EPA and in startups—Jim offers deep insights into the evolving corporate approach to climate action.

We delve into the key takeaways from this year's Climate Week in New York. Jim highlights how the event has grown beyond climate discussions to encompass material transitions like the circular economy and hard-to-abate sectors such as aluminium and steel. He shares encouraging progress, noting that members of the CEO Climate Action Alliance have achieved a 10% absolute reduction in emissions over three years, even as their businesses have grown.

A central theme of our conversation is the pivotal role of data and technology in accelerating sustainability initiatives. Jim explains that much of the necessary data for sustainability reporting already exists within companies but isn't effectively utilised. We explore how AI can act as a valuable colleague, handling tedious tasks like emissions factor mapping and freeing up human resources for strategic decision-making.

We also discuss the importance of standardising data exchange to ensure consistent and comparable sustainability reporting. Jim emphasises that agreeing on standards is crucial for making meaningful progress and avoiding the pitfalls of fragmented efforts.

Finally, we touch on the evolving role of the Chief Sustainability Officer and how sustainability is increasingly integrated into financial and operational planning. Jim offers advice to business leaders hesitant about committing to sustainability initiatives, stressing that while the best time to invest was a decade ago, the second-best time is now.

I hope you'll find this episode insightful as we explore how technology, data, and collaborative efforts can drive meaningful progress in the fight against climate change.

Check out SAP's Sustainability page for more.

Sign up to Climate Confident+ for deep dive analysis of the major climate and energy stories of the day.

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One of the producers I've worked with looking in at us going hey, it's great music. It sounds like a box of puppies. And I think, I think we might be in the box of puppies phase of putting together the strategies for this. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Climate Confident podcast, the number one podcast showcasing best practices in climate emission reductions and removals. And I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Don't forget to click follow on this podcast in your podcast app of choice to be sure you don't miss any episodes. Hi everyone. Welcome to a special edition of the Climate Confident Podcast. Today's edition is sponsored by SAP. My name is Tom Raftery and with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Jim. Jim Welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hey, Tom. First of all, thanks so much for having me here today. Really excited to be here, having just come back from New York Climate Week. A lot of trends and information to share with the audience today. My background is about 30 years in the sustainability and climate change space. I'm currently at SAP. I've been in the startup world, been at EPA, the government regulatory agency for the US working on the regulatory side, as well as voluntary programs and have a bit of a legal background as well. So I hope to bring a well rounded view into your podcast today. Fantastic. For people who might be unaware of Climate Week, the scope of it, can you give us a quick 101? Yeah, sure. I think this week has really been the largest in, in history from what I'm hearing anecdotally around that, but it's become a bit of a offshoot from the UN General Assembly meetings in New York where there are a number of side events, there's a number of activities going on. Industry is highly engaged, governments are highly engaged, NGOs are present as well, so it becomes an opportunity to really build off of the UN meetings in New York and hold a number of side events and really an entire week of digging into the sustainability topic. One thing that really began to trend last year, Tom, I'm, I'm really excited about on a personal level is seeing climate week also morphing into kind of the material transition as well. As you know, a circular economy is also a highly relevant topic. And as we look overall at the intersection between materials and climate, one big component is the energy transition, but another big component is the material transition. So we're starting to see more and more events around the hard to abate sectors, aluminum, steel, we're starting to see more and more events around packaging plastics, the upcoming treaty around that. So it's really grown a bit beyond just climate week is a, is a misnomer into a broader set of activities and engagements in New York. Okay. And this year's theme was "It's time". Am I right? It is, it's, It's well past time! Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The the best time to do something is probably a decade or more ago. The second best time is now. So I think reasonably appropriate for a theme. Okay. And what were SAP or what was yourself, you know, what, what was your role? Why were you going? What were you hoping to achieve? A couple of different things. I think as I said, it was a really good gathering of government officials, NGOs, business, and our goal is to really help accelerate these transitions. So we're seeing a interesting confluence this year of additional reporting and disclosure regulations hitting industry. So one of the goals is really to show that the data foundations exist today to be able to report and pull the data together for a lot of these things. So on their face, they seem highly complex, requiring a lot of different data sources. But the reality is much of this data really already exists in systems. It exists of known quality and occasionally it's hard to pull the data out of systems in order to serve it up in that way. So, you know, key message is data is generally available for these things. It can be accessed. I would say another key message. It's hard to get away from AI these days in the hype cycle, but I'm really looking at AI as a new colleague entering your team and somebody that's a really hard worker occasionally needs their work checked and validated by by their coworkers with a little more experience. But again, the, the goal is to get out of the 80 percent of time people are spending on data gathering and reporting and really put people back to the work of how do we look at the strategies needed to go forward with decarbonization and some of the material transitions we talked about. So, really just a lot of meetings with with customers, with governments, with NGOs around the role of technology and how this can help accelerate some of these transitions. Okay. And how can it help as in how is SAP contributing to the acceleration of climate action, you know, and how, how is data generally doing it, especially in areas like, you know, the new industrial revolution and the energy transition that you talked about already? Yeah, I think, I think there's two angles to that. First, we need to be a good corporate citizen. Daniel Schmidt and our team has done an amazing job at making sure that the foundation of SAP as a company is moving in this direction. So I will cite a colleague from probably 20 years ago in this space. There's really no silver bullet for addressing climate change, it's more like silver buckshot and you need to be firing a lot of these things at the at the challenge. So it's things like lower carbon sourcing. It's things like the, you know, dealing with data center energy. It's things like fleet operations. Travel and transport is a big component of SAP. So we're one of the few companies that's remained firm on our 2030 targets around climate going beyond the science based transition pathways. So that's really one side of it. The other side of it is really how do we help enable our customers and help enable the world around this. So a couple of trends I've seen out of this session is the confluence of kind of corporate level or group level reporting, and product level reporting, or material level reporting. There's always been a different granularity of data. And a lot of companies are really looking at the group level reporting, things like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the SEC Directive coming out, many of these things, and looking at a, you know, a vast horizontal slice of data that they need to pull together in order to be Compliant with the regulations. What we're also building towards is kind of the vertical slices of that data. How do you roll data up at a material level? How do you roll it up at a business activity level in order to get a much more granular, rich data set to be able to report at those corporate and group levels? So it's really moving the non financial ESG data, more towards a financial type reporting where you're doing it bottoms up, you're rolling data up from that, and then you're reporting out at the group level based on all of the activities going on within within the business unit. So I would say that's kind of a key, key message, a key investment we've done on our side. And it really is a ERP centric or enterprise resource centric planning approach towards how you get this this data. You know, to be realistic, not all data resides in SAP systems or not resides in ERP systems. There's a lot of things that need to be collected outside of that. But if you do have 60 or 70% of your data in known quality that maps to financials within these types of systems, why not reuse that data and get a really good head start in some of these reporting requirements. Yeah, it's interesting you measure, I'm sorry, it's interesting you mentioned reporting requirements because I've said on this podcast a bunch of times that, you know, the chief sustainability officer for organizations has very often in the past been reporting into the chief marketing officer, you know, which tells its own story, but with the increase in the rigor required from sustainability reporting in the future I can see that role transitioning from the CMO to the CFO's organization. Do you think that's a fair comment? I think it's a really fair comment and a great observation on where the market is going. So a number of companies are moving into the CFO. I think we as SAP did that probably a decade ago, and I can say the data quality improved immensely with the rigor of the finance organization. Looking at this, it becomes part of that trend, Tom, in order for the CSO to be able to take on a lot more of the activities. What am I doing to abate? What am I doing for strategy and investments and not spending as much time in the weeds of data quality? So I would say that's a very large trend within industry. We're also seeing it move into risk and governance. In a number of companies, we're moving it, seeing it moved to the CEO's office in a number of companies. And one trend that I'm starting to see is really looking at sustainability as a, as a P&L or a revenue driver. So we're starting to see many more CSOs taking on kind of a P&L view of how do I show sustainability is not only in an indirect way driving revenue and growth for my company, but maybe in a more direct way with actual sustainability LOBs lines of business or actual sustainability revenues from companies. So I think all of those trends are moving forward in a moment from the reporting side, certainly the CFO remains an important stakeholder but it, it, it remains a bit of a matrix operation to pull all the data together and feed it in the ways that people are able to use it in their day to day business. Okay. And talk to me a little bit again about Climate Week. I mean, what observations did you make about the event or what interesting conversations did you have with people there? Yeah, I, I, It's funny. I've been in this space quite a while Tom and I I tend to be a little on the pessimistic side of the world of having spent 30 years and not having quite solved the problem yet. I was, I was pretty optimistic this week. I was feeling a lot of kind of new stories coming out, new trends. Progress on this. So let me pull one highlight. We as SAP are members in the CEO Climate Action Alliance with the World Economic Forum. And this is a group of 130 ish companies that represent about 5.2 gigatons of emissions. So if added together, this would be the third largest party to the climate negotiations. And based on the data from the past three years of this commitment, we're actually seeing a 10% absolute reduction in emissions. And this is a robust across company growth as well. So it's a 12% intensity reduction from this group in addition. It's not just that we're losing business by doing this. Companies are growing fairly rapidly yet we're still able to decouple the carbon emissions from the business and revenue growth. So the numbers and the scale of this for companies taking on these science based targets. These types of commitments are you know, really some positive news. And I think you know, good news going into the, the conference of the parties upcoming. I think to add a little temper to that, you see a number of companies pulling back maybe from these targets. I think AI and energy use of AI is one topic that continually came up on this again. My feeling on this is a bit more optimistic. I think if we're turning AI towards some of these hard to handle use cases, it becomes an incredible colleague to do a lot of the calculations to figure these things out. So one example on our side that's really difficult to do is this emissions factor mapping. So not to get too nerdy in the weeds of climate change. But if you have an activity, you know you're making a material, in many cases, you can measure the emissions if you're at a large facility, but in many cases, if you're purchasing, you know, some cocoa beans or coffee or something, and your supplier may not have the data, you might want to estimate what that data is. So if you're talking about a large enterprise, this could be hundreds and hundreds of thousands of materials. So doing the mapping towards what the embedded emissions might be versus the material flows highly tedious, you know, job for somebody to do and sit there and do the mappings at every, every line. So this becomes a great case for AI, be able to accelerate some of those topics. So again, messaging for this is industry is doing a lot. Technology can help accelerate a lot more as to what's going on. So that was one side of the equation, the 2nd side is really on materials transition. We're seeing a lot of focus on things like extended producer responsibility. The downstream side of the equation. So as you're well familiar companies have enough trouble gathering upstream data where they know their suppliers. They know who they are and this is a fairly heavy lift. But once the products leave your 4 walls, how do you get data on the use phase? How do you get data on the materials coming back into systems? So this was a huge area of conversation. And I would say quite a bit of progress on looking at more of the cradle to grave life cycle within this as opposed to just cradle to gate. So that was a big point of conversation is how do you, how do you really. In a scalable way, mash up the material transitions, along with the energy and the climate transition and the 3rd point, I would say, which became vitally important is the role of standards within all of this. And I feel like the sustainability community. It's been more of a. Why have one standard when you can have 420 or 460 or however many regulations we're up to now. But there was a very strong effort by companies within the tech community by you know, the larger consulting organizations, the NGO communities to really come together and talk about how we can standardize the data exchange. If we get this wrong there's no way to really put Humpty back together. If we can agree on the way we're standardizing data it becomes really a accelerator and enabler. And it's, it's something a lot of the tech companies have put on the table and have been spending a lot of time on. So one concrete example of that is the PACT work with the World Business Council on Sustainable Development. This has been an investment for a number of years, and we now have a standardized protocol where companies can exchange carbon footprint data among the supply chains. So, you know, initiatives like this really give me a lot of hope. And there were a number of conversations, how this can be then extended into certain geographies, industry sectors. So, you know, Catena X is kind of an automotive industry standard, they're looking at aligning with PACT you then have Together for Sustainability within the chemical industry. And oh, by the way, the chemical industry is a huge supplier to the automotive industry. You have RMI working on the aluminum and steel sector by the way, also a huge supplier to the automotive industry. So I'm, I'm feeling a little positive about the standard side of the house coalescing and coming together around some of these initiatives as well. So those are kind of the big three takeaways that are giving me some hope and optimism for this year. Great, great, and on the technology helping front, I saw a story last week I think it was from Google where their DeepMind organization have released I think it is called AlphaChip. So this is an AI that can design AI chips, and so you're going to see a beautiful virtuous circle there as the AI designs more and more efficient and more powerful AI chips. They'll then be used in the next iteration to design the next AI chips and so on and so on. So the, the, and we've seen how these things kind of grow exponentially. So I got to think that the, the AI power consumption and the compute power is just going to go up and to the right really, really quickly. But apart from that, we'll, we'll shelve that for a second. Did you get any action items coming out of the climate week? Yeah, I think a couple of things. So one, I think, completely relates to your AI story, Tom. I think one of the things that has come out of a lot of these conversations is people say, Hey, we've taken on a science based commitment. We've plucked all of our low hanging fruit and now things are getting really, really hard. And one of kind of my comments, action items is I, I, the term low hanging fruit is more like a bamboo forest in this space, it grows back very, very rapidly, occasionally takes over your yard and with things like AI taking a look at the day to day opportunities I think the low hanging fruit will, will continue rise in abundance. So that's not to say there are not some very hard investments and very hard decisions that need to be made, you know, but there are typically 30 to 40% of options, which are completely no regret options. So again, our role as a technology company, our takeaway is how do we continuously create that virtuous cycle so that these options continue to build. They continue to grow back huge opportunity on the demand side. One of the programs we ran at EPA is Energy Star. You may be familiar with it, with you know, ways of measuring the energy within you know, products. It started with laptops. It's since moved on to all appliances, to buildings, even to large structures and, you know, really the benefit of this is if you look at the demand side reduction, given the state of our grids and generation, it tends to be sexier, maybe to invest in a new hydrogen plant or a new wind farm. You know, it's a shovel ready project. You can see what you've invested in, but reducing the demand side leads to about a 2.5 X benefit of reducing emissions on the supply side, given the the way that energy flows and all of this. So I think again, huge actions to take on the demand side, huge actions to take within the business of continuing to innovate in these continuous cycles of how to continuously improve a lot of the actions we're taking. And then my big takeaway in the action item is really around the standards side of things. We have a window of opportunity to get a number of disparate groups together to agree that on the data models on the way that data is exchanged. And if we get this right, it will have a huge amplification effect in the market. So those are those are some of the homework items coming coming back with us. Cool, cool. And, you know, you mentioned that you've been in the space for a number of decades now. How have you seen the conversation around climate change evolve in the corporate world? I would say this is a bittersweet observation, but, you know, 20 years ago, we had the predictive models of what the damages from climate change would be, what some of the implications for industry are. And what we're now seeing is, you know, this coming to life on a on a daily basis. You know, there are now a lot more proof points than there were 20 years ago on this. And you're starting to see industries react with a risk to physical assets. You know, the, the hundred year storm is now happening every year or two. So it's, I think, you know, what's changed is it's moved from, you know, more of a theoretical and modeling perspective to a happening every day in the world perspective. And you know, you get the sense of. talking to various sectors, the grape growers in France and there will be winners and losers around this. So I think you know, that's one trend I've seen is it's become a lot more real. Another trend is that this risk is now being recognized by the financial markets as well. So you're seeing the investors and others beginning to have a stronger role in asking about this risk. And this is where the SEC, where the CSRD, the, you know, various regulations of disclosure are coming in where people want a more comprehensive view of this risk for companies to disclose. And again, I think, you know, number two ties back to number one. If we don't have consistent standards, especially around the boundary conditions where people are reporting you, you don't really get like to like, data. So again, a huge role in standardization to make sure the data becomes comparable, usable for investors around that. And the third thing I would say, and this is something technology can really enable, is it did take a lot of time and energy to pull the data together. It was in disparate sources and a best practice 20 years ago or 10 years ago was you know, we close our books in January, maybe, or March, depending on your fiscal year. We take a six month cycle to go look at the data, collect everything, and, you know, maybe nine months or a year later, we publish a backwards looking review mirror report on how we did and then we turn our attention to the data collection cycle again. So I think one of the huge trends I've seen is more of a predictive, forward looking view into the drivers of these data cycles. What's causing the emissions? What are the levers we can pull in advance? And this is one of the big kind of bets or investments we've made at SAP. It should not necessarily be the CSO that needs to take a rearward looking view into the data and decide on direction and what you should do. But how do you push that data? Not in a real time basis. That's expensive. It's hard. It might not be needed for all things, but maybe on a monthly basis, or a more forward looking basis to the office of the CFO. They don't know what a scope three is necessarily or a scope two or any of these technical terms. They know you know, what a profit center, what a cost center you know, what the business is set up like. So how do you serve the sustainability data starting with carbon in a format that that they understand. So this is really our initiative around Green Ledger. How do you put carbon data in the form of a financial ledger. But we, you know, it, it looks the same way with any other line of business for procurement spend control tower, how do you serve up carbon data in a way that you can do category management as a chief procurement officer, as a chief operations officer? How does it tie to integrated business planning in many of these topics where you can begin to use the carbon cycles to take a forward look at how you're operating, which production lines and a final one, which is a pretty simple example, but comes out of the packaging world is people are making design decisions, procurement decisions without an understanding of where the final product and material is going. And if it goes into a country like the UK with a plastic tax, if you don't have 30% recycled content, you're triggering a tax. So how do we bring the downstream life cycle, actual costs as well as carbon and the other pieces at the design phase at the procurement phase. So people have a very good idea of the decisions that they're that they're making. You mentioned grapes there and winemaking. I was listening to a conversation last week where the guy was saying that the grape growers in France very often have records of their harvest going back hundreds of years. And so in this one particular vineyard he was at, they could see that the grapes were harvested typically end of September, start of October, a couple of hundred years ago, and it's been gradually moving closer and closer, and now it's typically end of August, start of September, just due to the changing climate. It's, it's, and it's not just grapes, it's, it's all crops and all animals migrating as well into kind of cooler climes or climes that they're more associated with. It's, it's, it's and, We saw Hurricane Helene last week, you know, blow out a lot of the, the, the Southeast of the Us. It's, it's crazy stuff that's going on and not just there. I mean, we saw floods in Southeast Asia as well and in Central Europe and yeah, not, not fun times. As you said, this was all predicted 20 years and more years ago. Yeah, and one other concrete example I I tend to love and I came to the sustainability space from my love of spending time in the mountains. I grew up in upstate New York, spent my formative years skiing white face. And you know, when I get to Europe now we'll tend to go do tours and I've become good friends with a number of the guides out there and they have the same type of records for the glacier movements and the ski seasons and all of these things. And, you know, over a year to year basis, it's tough to get some data separation from the noise, but over, you know, two generations of guiding, you've got records of what year the season opens, what year the season closes. When to pull your mountain bike out instead of your skis and skins. And it's you know, it's pretty amazing to look at the changes over even, you know, a human lifetime. yeah, yeah. Climate Week emphasizes the need to triple renewable energy capacity and double energy efficiency. How realistic do you think those goals are and what steps should we take to achieve them? Ah, start, start with a easy question here, why don't you, I think there are different strategies on either side of the equation. I'm a strong, let me start with the demand side first, cause I'm a strong believer that these are low hanging fruit, there's a lot of opportunity. And it becomes an information you know, kind of sharing information distribution issue to make a better decision. So I'm highly optimistic on this one because it's cost beneficial and it really takes intervention on the information side as opposed to the new technology side. New technologies, of course, help accelerate all of this. The AI, you know, design chips will lead to, you know, much higher efficiencies on that. But there is so much opportunity out there in the world today. That's that's below the cost curve. It just makes makes good sense. The hardest part about that. And the barrier to that tends to be that these systems are highly, highly localized and distributed. I'll give you maybe my I don't know if it's my favorite example, but a realistic one from 20 years ago when they came out with the waterless urinal. And it was a revolution. We can do this without water and huge water savings. And then, you know, when the first buildings began to put them in, the cost was through the roof. And why was that? It's a new technology. It's a little higher cost, but every single building code said, Hey, any urinal you put in, you must run a quarter inch plumbing line to this. And it needs to come from the water main and everything. And you look at it and go, wait a minute. These things don't need water. Yeah, but the building code says everyone needs a water line. And you know, the plumbers unions are going to make sure that the water lines are there. So it's, it's. You know, almost on a building code by building code on a, on a regional basis that some of these things need to be thought through. So highly optimistic on that one. That's the similar issue coming to the supply side, and I think renewables are a default choice in many markets now. The hard part there is the the you know, is how to sharpen the grid in order to make sure that this distributed generation is able to get to the right places at the right time and see these demand signals. So a number of the regulations, a number of the work in this space, you know, was done decades, 50 years ago. And you know, with things like you know, whether you're able to do net metering at your house and get a benefit from some of the renewables that people are putting on versus, you know, losing the output of that and sinking costs is a, is a regulatory issue. So there's a lot of work that could be done on smoothing regulations for this. I think it could help with infrastructure. You know, we tend to build grids towards the, you know, 0.1% of peak load. So that we're not, you know, screwing things up, making sure that you know, that you're hitting that one minute of the one day of the one year that's the hottest moment in the world so that you can have enough capacity for power to flow and not hit a problem. But you know, with AI, with some of this distributed generations, are there ways to make these things more resilient to be able to build towards more of the, shifting of load and storing of energy. So this is where we're battery technology where hydrogen where a number of these kind of storage techniques become vitally important. But this is also an area where significant government intervention where the costs were very high for early movers here. So how can you set up the right incentives and like the IRA and other things to continue to drive the supply side work as well. So optimistic. I think a little more cautiously optimistic on that one, because there needs to be some structural change to get to those kind of numbers is in addition to that. But I think we're all familiar with the, you know, with the electric vehicles and, you know, whether that's trending upward or downward at the moment, but it's amazing, you know, area for battery storage, your homes, you can generate, you can store, you can, you can really load shift depending on pricing and when the renewables are running in time of day. So, lots of opportunities there, but a little bit of a structural issue to make sure those are able to be unlocked. Mmm yeah, interesting you mention the batteries, I was looking at a post on Threads yesterday I think it was from a used who was impacted by the power cuts by Hurricane Helene. And this particular guy had a Hyundai Ioniq 5, lovely car an electric vehicle. And he was running his house and his neighbor's house from the battery in the car. And it was, you know, people don't realize the amount of energy that's stored in a car battery. If you think of the, for example, the Tesla Powerwalls, which can power a house for a couple of days, typically that's 14 kilowatt hours of storage, whereas a typical car like that Ioniq, depending on which version it is, has a 70 or 80 kilowatt hour battery. So many multiples of a Powerwall and that's not unusual. I drive a Kia Niro and that's a 64 kilowatt hour battery, for example. So, the, and the, the ability for a vehicle to load, or vehicle to grid is, is going to be a, a huge game changer. I think. We see buses, school buses are another great example. I, I had a company on the podcast a few weeks ago talking about using them for vehicle to grid. So it's, it is a re a huge, huge game changer. But coming back to, to climate, Yeah, I was going to say, and again on that, Tom, I think a huge game changer, but also requires a lot of local regulations to, you know, make that possible. So it's a, it's a fairly heavy lift at the local level to to actually, you know, achieve that reality or that potential of of the game changer. Yeah. Particularly for vehicle to grid, for vehicle to home, less so in terms of the regulations. You do need a car that's capable of doing it. Not all cars are, but it's, it is an easier lift as it were. With, with climate week's theme of"It's time", what message would you like to send to business leaders who are still hesitant about committing to sustainability initiatives? You know, the reality of it is these are mega trends. They're not going away and the scope and the scale of investment might go up or down depending on, you know, what other factors are going on and what other investments. But again, I, I think the key message is the best time to invest was probably a decade ago. The second best time is now, I would say. You know, this is a balance between the quarterly returns needed and keeping the market happy and knowing that there are mega trends that are driving, you know, the effect on companies for for the next year, for the next five years, for the decade to come. So, it's really about balancing the portfolio of the investment, but also keeping, you know, kind of eyes on the prize. These things are not going away where some of the other hype cycles, you know, will come in quickly. Maybe go away a little more quickly. This one is, is here to stay. It's been robust for decades, and I don't think the disclosure requirements are going to go away anytime soon. And I don't think the impacts are going to go away anytime soon. This is a generational challenge. So, it requires investment. And I think you know, again, realistic enough to know people are, are, you can't go whole hog into it. It's a, it's a you know, some of the benefits might be out a little further in the, in the future, but it's an area that requires consistent vigilance and and focus. And you know, we'll continue to be a major, major driver for risk and opportunity for companies. Sure, sure. Left field question. If we are combining your passions, if creating a sustainable future were like composing a piece of music, what elements would be essential to making it a hit? Left field question. I will give you an anecdote from one of the producers I've I've worked with looking in at us going hey, it's great music. It sounds like a box of puppies. And I think, I think we might be in the box of puppies phase of putting together the strategies for this. There are so many things that are working and working well, and individually, they sound good, and there are POCs that are coming out well, and there are pilots, and there are all of these things, but how do you get that to work together at scale, and to work together harmoniously, to actually have the bigger piece of music, if you will, or the impact on the planet come together and instead of, you know, this, this image of a box of puppies jumping all over each other to, you know, to get to the get to the market and show what's going on. So again, this ties back to my theme of standards and coordination. If we can agree on some of the standards, if we can agree on ways of exchanging data around this, I think we can get through some of that. But that's you know, especially after coming from New York and Climate Week, that's the best analogy I can give you at the moment. I like it. I like it. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Jim. Is there any question I did not ask that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of? I, I think it's been it's been a pleasure to be here today. So first of all, thanks so much. I'm still in the recovery phase of Climate Week and thinking through a lot of the hard work that remains in the pathway to COP and in the pathway to the future. I think the, the one message that r the one thing I wish we talked about maybe a little more is the ties of the material transition with the energy transition and thinking through some of these things. So one big picture topic that that hit me at Climate Week, but we, we look at, like, circular economy and some of the servitization of materials. Like, I'm gonna give you the service of having a carpet as opposed to selling you carpet, the interface example, or the service of, you know, airline miles rather than the you know, for Rolls Royce, rather than selling you an engine. And I'm wondering, Tom, you know, what, what lessons we can learn from material transition back into the energy transition. You can now use an electron to power your car for a number of miles, or you could use it to make aluminum, or you could use it to do these things. So can, can we begin to look at the energy transition? It's what's the, value you're getting out of the electron rather than measuring in electrons. Is it? Is it better to do, you know, 20 car miles versus this much aluminum from the green energy? And how do we begin to look at maybe the servitization of of that a bit? So I don't think this happens anytime soon. But you know, these, these kind of big picture questions pop up as, a s we're going through some of these meetings. So are there ways to, you know, better tie this this material side of things to the energy side of things? There's a great report I would turn your readers or your listeners towards from Ellen MacArthur Foundation a few years ago, that's showing to solve the climate problem. It's about a 50 percent energy transition problem, but it's about a 50%, you know, about half is related to material transition, particularly in the hard to abate sectors, in the cement, the aluminum, the steel, the food and agriculture, the bio based side of things there. So, you know, we really need to look at the confluence of these two trends and not view them independently and separately. Good point. Good point. Jim, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? I would go to the SAP site around sustainability. There is some wonderful information around there and people can, of course, feel free to reach out if they'd like to like to learn more. Super. I'll put the link in the show note for that. And that way everyone will have access to it. Great. Jim, that's been fascinating. Thanks a million for the conversation. It's been really, really interesting. Yeah, it was a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for the for the conversation. I enjoyed it. Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.