CO2 Controlling in Businesses

How can companies do carbon accounting and decarbonization management?

The presentation illustrates how internationally proven accounting tools and procedures can help companies to re-use their bookkeeping and controlling for carbon accounting. The corporate accounting system is extended to include carbon. This enables meaningful, comparable and verifiable reporting for all interested parties. Decarbonization can thus be implemented in a more strategically focused manner.

Christoph Ernst is a seasoned executive with extensive experience in finance solutions. As Head of SAP Global Product Management for Finance & Risk, he led strategic innovation for five years, enabling Cloud-, Analytics- and AI-based transformation at customers. Since joining SAP in 1999 as an Education Consultant, he successfully led the Presales Organization before shaping SAP’s global solution strategy. He later founded SAP’s CFO Product Management, spearheading major innovations, including the SAP Green Ledger—a finance-grade, double-entry bookkeeping solution that enables businesses to track carbon quantities, comply with emerging regulations, and navigate the path to net-zero. As of 2025, April 1, he joined the Mannheim Institute for Sustainable Energy Studies (MISES) as a Research Fellow at University of Mannheim, chair of Prof. Dr. Stefan Reichelstein. Christoph holds a PhD in History from Universität Trier, where his research focused on the evolution of sustainable forest management in 18th-century Germany.