As we move through 2026, I'm back with the next edition of my quarterly blog series covering the latest innovations and highlights in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management. This quarter brought a strong mix of updates — from richer analytics and a new carbon balance to broader environmental impact calculations, expanded emission factor content, and a first look at where we're taking AI and regulatory support. In this blog post, I'm covering:

Analytics Enhancements

Good analytics are what turn footprint calculations into decisions, so this quarter we focused on the Footprint Overview app, which now includes new functions for an improved user experience. The updated app aligns with sustainability reporting frameworks and introduces footprint comparison as a capability, so you can put results side by side instead of looking at them in isolation. In addition, the top five contributors are now directly available on the main view, helping you act on insights instead of only validating calculation results.

The app organizes results into four sections – Climate, Products, Energy, and Waste – accessible from a navigation panel. The Climate section shows total GHG emissions broken down by GHG scope and category, and surfaces the top five plants by emissions; the Energy, Products, and Waste sections highlight the most significant contributors among energy sources and consumers, purchased and sold products, and waste in operations. From any chart you can drill into the underlying records in apps such as GHG Emissions, Manage Footprint Results, or Waste Generated in Operations. The new Compare With option lets you benchmark a selected inventory against a reference footprint inventory, calculation variant, or period, showing primary and reference values side by side together with the absolute and percentage difference. With comparison and the top contributors surfaced up front, it becomes much faster to spot where your biggest hotspots are and how they shift between periods or scenarios. For more information, see Analyzing Footprint Overview on SAP Help.

Carbon Balance for Production Processes

One of the key innovations this quarter is the new carbon balance calculation for production processes. With this feature, SAP Sustainability Footprint Management enables you to track and calculate direct Scope 1 – Process Emissions from production by comparing the carbon entering a process with the carbon leaving it. The approach is modeled on the principle of mass balance, such as the methodology outlined in the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) Monitoring and Reporting Regulation, so the resulting emissions are grounded in an established regulatory accounting method.

This is especially relevant for production processes where carbon is physically transformed. To use the new approach, you provide carbon content data for the production-related business transactions that represent the two sides of the balance. Goods Issue for Production represents material issued from a plant with reference to a production document, while Goods Receipt from Production represents material received at a plant with reference to a production document.

When you calculate the production footprint, the system first determines the difference in carbon content by subtracting the sum of the output carbon content from the sum of the input carbon content – the amount of carbon directly emitted during the production step. This difference is then multiplied by the C-to-CO2 conversion factor to translate it into Climate Change CO2e, which is added to the total footprint of the production and distributed to the output items. The result can be either positive or negative depending on the relationship between input and output carbon: if more carbon is emitted than is captured in the outgoing products, the value is negative, whereas if more carbon is captured in the outputs, the value is positive. Where production is not yet closed, work-in-progress items carry their carbon content over into the next period.

After a successful calculation, you can view the production results in the Manage Footprint Results app. For footprint items of type Production, the carbon balance appears as an input item under the Allocation category – connected to the business transaction Allocation on Production – and its climate change impact is shown in the Sankey chart quick view. The underlying moisture and carbon content values for the in-going and out-going products are available on the Input and Output tabs for review. Under Allocation, you can also navigate to the calculation details and formula of the carbon balance.

To support this capability, the Import Business Transactions (Corporate and Products) API has also been enhanced with the new moistureContent and carbonContentPerUnit fields. For more information, see Calculating Carbon Balance and the scenario guide Calculating Scope 1 Emissions (Carbon Content) Using Business Transaction Data on SAP Help.

Expanded Gas Impact Categories for Environmental Footprint Analysis

In previous updates, I introduced how SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is evolving from a carbon-focused solution into a broader environmental footprint platform (see: Deep Dive: Multi-Impact Categories in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management). This quarter, we’re continuing that journey with seven new gas-related impact categories for environmental footprint calculations:

• CO2 – Carbon Dioxide (Total Biogenic and Fossil)
• CH4 – Methane (Total Biogenic and Fossil)
• N2O – Nitrous Oxide
• HFCs – Hydrofluorocarbons (Aggregated GHGs)
• PFCs – Perfluorocarbons (Aggregated GHGs)
• SF6 – Sulphur Hexafluoride
• NF3 – Nitrogen Trifluoride

This gives you more transparency into the constituent gases behind the overall greenhouse gas (GHG) picture, with each gas calculated using its own characterization factors based on global warming potential, and separate biogenic and fossil treatment for CO2 and methane. For more information on the gases, see Impact Categories on SAP Help.

In the Manage Emission Factors app, you can maintain emission factors for the new gas categories either directly in the UI or by importing them via the app template, as with the other impact categories.

In the Manage Footprint Inventory Scopes app, you activate the relevant impact categories for your scope. With this release, you can activate up to 12 impact categories, including Climate Change, which remains enabled by default. Once scoped and calculated, the new categories are visible in the Manage Footprint Results app, where the system shows total footprints and statuses across the selected impact categories and the contribution of GHG categories into them.

Constituent Gases in the Item Footprint

Footprint Data Offloading

As customers run footprint calculations period after period, the volume of calculated inventory data grows over time. To help you manage that data lifecycle, this quarter we introduced the new Manage Footprint Data Offloads app, which lets you move calculated footprint inventories to long-term storage once they are no longer needed in the active system. This helps you optimize system performance, reduce license consumption, and support your organizational sustainability objectives, all while keeping the data available for the duration you need it.

To make this controllable, footprint data offloading is built around two configurable time periods that you now set per scope in the Manage Footprint Inventory Scopes app:

• The residence period is the minimum time that calculated footprint inventory data stays in the system before it becomes eligible for offloading to long-term storage. It must be at least 24 months and is part of the overall retention period.
• The retention period is the total time the data must be kept, including both the residence period in the system and the time in long-term storage. It must also be at least 24 months. After the retention period ends, you can permanently delete the data.

The Manage Footprint Data Offloads app lists all calculated footprint inventories with the status Calculated Successfully, Calculated with Errors, or Calculated. Once an inventory’s residence period has ended, you can offload it from this app, and you can also delete the data of calculated footprint inventories to manage your data lifecycle and system resources. Offloaded inventories can be downloaded as JSON files, so the data remains accessible for archiving, reporting, or audit purposes after it leaves the active system. Offloading actions are also captured in the audit logs.

Manage Footprint Data Offloads

If you’re already a customer, this transition is handled for you: any footprint inventories created before this feature are automatically migrated, with the residence period set to 24 months and the retention period set to 36 months by default. You can adjust these periods per scope going forward to match your own data governance and reporting requirements. Note that to use the app, you need the relevant footprint data and calculation roles. For more information, see Offloading Calculated Footprint Inventories in the Release Impact Information on SAP Help.

Emission Factors: Expanded Default Content & Sustamize Partnership

High-quality emission factors remain the foundation for accurate and audit-ready footprint results. This quarter, we broadened the emission factor content from two complementary angles: we refreshed the default content and we added new premium partner content that you can purchase through the SAP Store. As always, the data flows into the Manage Emission Factors app, so you can mix SAP-provided content, partner content, and your own imported data packages within one consistent governance and calculation model.

Default Content from ADEME and EPA

Also this quarter, we further extended the default emission factor content that SAP Sustainability Footprint Management delivers out of the box. We’ve added emission factors from the French Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME), which is the official public reference database of emission factors for France, organized along the GHG Protocol’s Scope 1, 2, and 3 structure and used as the basis for regulatory greenhouse gas reporting in the French market. Adding ADEME as default content gives you well-recognized, France-relevant factors out of the box, which is particularly valuable if you operate in or source from France.

Furthermore, you can now use new versions of emission factors from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), spanning across the years 2015, 2018, 2020-2022, and 2025. The EPA packages are U.S.-focused and include content for GHG Scopes 1, 2, and 3.

Taken together, this is a substantial expansion of what you get out of the box: all default content draws on six different open-source databases and comprises around 45,300 individual datasets, across UK, US, France, Germany, as well as Europe and Global geographies. The datasets cover Energy, Fuels, Purchased Products, Passenger Travel, Transport of Goods, Process Emissions, and Refrigerants, giving you much wider coverage across categories and regions before you need to bring in your own or partner content. As before, this default content is kept separate from any factors you import yourself: if you don’t maintain your own datasets you can rely on the default content directly, and if you do, you continue to import, release, upgrade, archive, and delete your own data packages alongside it within the same governance model. For more information, see Using Default Emission Factor Data in SAP Help.

Partner Content from Sustamize

Beyond the content SAP delivers directly, we’re also constantly exploring partnership options and I’m happy to share that Sustamize emission factor datasets are now available through the SAP Store: Sustamize Scope 3 Data / Carbon Footprint Data. Sustamize provides high-quality, fully regionalized CO2e emission factors for product carbon footprints and Scope 3 calculations, with over 10 million emission factors across materials, components, and processes. The datasets are continuously updated, validated, and aligned with standards such as the GHG Protocol and ISO 14067, and they integrate directly into SAP Sustainability Footprint Management for scalable, audit-ready emissions calculations.

This partnership means you can:

• Access a large, granular CO2e database across materials, processes, and regions.
• Strengthen auditability and compliance with standardized data.
• Increase accuracy with regional electricity consumption mix data.
• Enable automated Scope 3 and product carbon footprint (PCF) calculations at scale.
• Stay current with regularly updated datasets reflecting real-world conditions.

Because this content is consumed through the same Manage Emission Factors app as the rest of your data packages, you can adopt it without changing how you scope, calculate, or govern your footprints.

Other Release Highlights

In the Manage Purchased Product Footprints app, you can now enter a plant when creating or importing purchased product group footprints. The plant represents geographical information, such as country or region, so you can define emission factors for a product group at plant level and better capture geographical differences. This works together with the Purchased product footprint on the product group level determination method in the Manage Calculation Variants app, and if both a plant-specific and a non-plant-specific footprint exist for the same product group, the system uses the more specific footprint with plant assignment. See Creating Footprints for Purchased Products and Product Groups on SAP Help for more details.

The Waste Generated in Operations app now displays a subtotal row at the end of each group in the table, showing combined Waste Quantity and Total Footprint values so you can see each group’s total contribution without manually adding individual rows. For more information, see Analyzing Footprints for Waste Generated in Operations on SAP Help.

The Manage Locations app now includes a read-only field showing which address fields were used to calculate geocoordinates. The system first uses all available address fields and, if that returns no result, retries using only country/region and postal code, so minor address issues no longer necessarily prevent a location from receiving accurate geocoordinates. For more details, see Manage Locations on SAP Help.

On the API side, the existing Item Footprints API has been renamed to Item Footprints – V1 and is now deprecated (bug fixes only), while a new Item Footprints – V2 API is available on SAP Business Accelerator Hub with a similar payload structure but improved performance for bulk operations. The batch size capacity for the Item Footprints API has also been expanded from 1,000 to 10,000 records. See APIs for Analytics on SAP Help for all details. In addition, the Import Business Transactions (Corporate and Products) API now includes the new moistureContent and carbonContentPerUnit fields supporting the carbon balance calculation. For more information, see APIs for Data Import on SAP Help.

Outlook: Footprint Optimization Agent & CBAM Solution

Beyond the features that shipped this quarter, I also want to share a brief outlook on where we’re heading, across both AI and regulatory topics. For staying updated on all planned innovations, I recommend checking out SAP Road Map Explorer.

Footprint Optimization Agent

At SAP Sapphire this May, SAP announced a new family of sustainability AI agents, planned for general availability by the end of 2026, that embed carbon, compliance, and safety intelligence directly into everyday business workflows rather than treating sustainability as a separate, manual exercise. The line-up spans regulatory readiness, packaging compliance, hazard classification and labeling, workplace safety, and footprint optimization. Read here the full press release: The Path to the Autonomous Enterprise: SAP Announces New Sustainability AI Agents.

The Footprint Optimization Agent is part of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management and is designed to help you move from footprint insights to informed action with real impact. It lets you review your corporate and product carbon footprints faster and in more detail, analyzing emission sources across multiple dimensions – products, processes, plants, and value-chain stages – on a consistent calculation foundation, so you can identify footprint hotspots and the reduction levers that matter most.

From there, you can run what-if scenarios to examine how operational choices such as production methods, energy inputs, and sourcing patterns would affect your footprint, and compare emission-reduction scenarios side by side against your baseline. Because all simulations rely on the same underlying footprint data and shared assumptions, the results are directly comparable, helping you understand whether a change reduces impact and by how much. The agent can then generate executive-ready views of footprint calculations, drivers, scenarios, and comparisons, giving sustainability, operations, and finance teams a shared starting point to prioritize high-impact initiatives, map the financial impact, and track progress against reduction goals. The Footprint Optimization Agent is planned to be generally available in Q4 2026, so I’ll come back to it in more detail once it’s released. For more details, see the business case Reduce Carbon Footprint More Efficiently with AI.

The following video is part of this year's sustainability showcase at SAP Sapphire and gives you a preview of how AI agents automate reporting – creating data points and linking metrics to disclosures with traceable lineage. It shows how you can use these agents to identify carbon hotspots, simulate scenarios, and recommend actions balancing cost and risk (Footprint Optimization Agent starts at 3:22).

The Footprint Optimization Agent is however only one part of how we’re bringing AI into the product. We’re also continuing to invest in the AI capabilities already embedded in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management. For the AI-assisted emission factor mapping we plan to release significant improvements in July already to make mapping your products, materials, and business transactions to suitable emission factors faster, more accurate, and easier to govern. Stay tuned for the details.

CBAM Solution

With the CBAM definitive regime having started on January 1, 2026, we also announced new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) capabilities planned for SAP Sustainability Footprint Management together with SAP Green Ledger later this year. CBAM reporting requires total embedded emissions that are consistent, repeatable, and traceable, often across thousands of shipments and suppliers, which is exactly the kind of scaled calculation SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is built for.

The planned CBAM capabilities in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management will include centralizing ERP and master data enhanced for CBAM purposes alongside official CBAM content, automating the interpretation and use of supplier data, calculating embedded emissions, certificates, and estimated CBAM cost, a CBAM dashboard to view and analyze emissions and costs, and the generation of reports ready for download and submission to the EU. The exact cost calculation will be based on the weekly EU ETS price in SAP Green Ledger, which accounts for the financial liability triggered by CBAM-covered emissions and the certificates used to settle it, in line with IFRS and US GAAP. Together, SAP Sustainability Footprint Management and SAP Green Ledger connect emissions data with the financial dimensions companies already use, so carbon can be governed, allocated, forecasted, audited, and reconciled in line with financial data. The first release is planned for Q4 2026, and I’ll share more details in the next months. To learn more about CBAM and our solution, read the following blog: CBAM Definitive Regime: What to Know and Actions to Take.

Analyst Recognition: IDC MarketScape Leader

I’m also happy to share that for the second time SAP has been recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Carbon Accounting and Management Applications 2026 Vendor Assessment. The assessment evaluated 17 vendors on how well they support credible emissions measurement, strong data governance, corporate-, product-, and supplier-level visibility, and standards-based reporting. It singles out SAP’s ERP-embedded approach, which “unifies financial, operational, and sustainability data into a single, trusted foundation”, as a key strength. SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is a core part of this suite, enabling organizations to calculate carbon footprints across Scopes 1, 2, and 3. It’s great external validation of the direction many of the features in these updates are taking. For more information and downloading the report, see the SAP News Feature: SAP Named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Carbon Accounting and Management Applications 2….

Additional Information

For in-depth details on SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, including concepts, setup, and the application help, I recommend you browsing through the SAP Help Portal. For an overview of all new features and functions that have been released, check the What’s New section, which is updated with every new software release.

To see what’s ahead, the SAP Road Map Explorer gives you a forward-looking view of planned innovations for SAP Sustainability Footprint Management. And if you’d like to help shape the product, the SAP Influence portal is the place to submit improvement requests and vote on ideas from other customers and partners – many of the enhancements I cover in these posts started as customer requests there.

For exploring and experimenting in a live system, register for the free SAP Sustainability Footprint Management Trial. You’ll receive an e-mail with access information within seconds after your registration and can then test the solution at your own convenience within a 30-day trial period. It also includes a wide range of guided tours designed to help you navigate through the features and functions comprehensively.

To stay up to date on SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, follow me here in the SAP Community. In regular cadence, I’ll publish blog posts giving you updates on all the product’s new features and functions as well as deep dives into the product capabilities. I’m also looking forward to engaging with you directly, feel free to leave your feedback in the comment section.