[Economics] Economics could curtail sustainability initiatives in 2023

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Companies have pledged to implement sustainability initiatives that foster goals such as reducing

 carbon emissions, but developing metrics and making those initiatives quantifiable remain works in progress. ERP vendors are hoping to find a place in that process. Two in particular, SAP and IFS, made steps in providing applications to serve as the backbone for customers' sustainability initiatives. But the success of those initiatives, especially given the economic downturn, and the ability of enterprise application vendors to help facilitate in that success are open questions. Sustainability hype is justified Efforts to improve sustainability are both hyped and justified, said Joshua Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting. Companies are adopting sustainability goals because the world is moving to regimes where they have to meet requirements to generate energy using non-carbon-based technologies as well as start to decarbonize the atmosphere, he said. Decarbonization is not only becoming essential for doing business, it's also becoming big business itself, Greenbaum said. "There are estimates that just the carbon sequestration business alone will exceed the size of the actual energy production business in our lifetimes," he said. "We'll be spending more of the global economy to take carbon out of the air than we will to produce the energy that we need." All of this will require investment by technology companies to provide tools to improve organizations' ability to track how they use energy and materials in making and distributing products, Greenbaum said. ERP vendors could play a role in developing tools to backbone sustainability initiatives, he said. ERP data is central to the processes that are crucial for sustainability, and SAP, for example, has made sustainability part of its platform for years. "SAP is absolutely putting a stake in the ground on this," Greenbaum said. "As a European company, they've been doing this for a while, and they're working with European Union governments on issues like compliance."

https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/news/252528638/Economics-could-curtail-sustainability-initiatives-in-2023