


This figure shows the various governments around the world that have issued environmental regulations to protect the environment and the ecosystem. For example, in US there is the Clean Air Act to ensure good quality of air, the Clean Water Act to protect the natural waters of the US and minimize the pollution.
Similarly, other country governments have issues similar policies and regulations to protect the environment.

Beyond governments enacting laws to protect the environment, various internal and external stake holders are pressuring organizations / businesses to improve their environmental performance and report it.
For example, investors are asking companies to report their environmental performance data annually in the Sustainability reports.
Business partners are asking for certification to prove they have good environmental management systems in place - for example, ISO140001.
Internal management is concerned with the impact to the brand for not being environmentally conscience the risk associated with it.

Environmental management challenges are as follows:
- They must follow all requirements from various applicable regulations / policies / permits
- They must be aware of changes to multiple specific rules / requirements
- They must enact a timely fulfillment of compliance requirements and record-keeping
- They must ensure proper data collection and calculation accuracy
- They must maintain consistent, transparent, and auditable inventory processes
Government policies as well as internal / external stake holders pose a challenge to an organization to ensure they stay compliant all the time. Organizations have to identify all the requirements they need to comply with be it from policies, regulations or permits. Sometimes, these can be in thousands for one location. They have to keep up with changing regulations, implement compliance requirements in a timely manner and keep records, collect and / or calculate environmental data, plus implement a consistent, transparent, and auditable compliance process.

You have already learned in the previous unit that SAP product Environment Management can help with creating inventories of air emissions. This same product can also help you generate inventories of GHG emissions. SAP Environment Management can help our customers to calculate, monitor, and report their GHG emissions. It does so by leveraging functionality like pre-built equation and emission factor library for some regulations, automate, and workflow-based data collection, proactively flagging data with issues, monitoring and reporting of GHG emissions.
As a summary, SAP's environment management product support customers in the following:
- Leverage pre-built emission factor library and equations
- Collect activity data like fuel used, or electricity used
- Proactively flag data issue with data collection or emission calculations
- Monitor thresholds of greenhouse gas emissions
- Report on greenhouse gas emissions

The picture above represents all master data objects involved in environmental management processes and their related actions.