Video transcript: Why is data crucial to sustainability reporting, the challenges and how should businesses approach the data challenge

Transcript

Why is data crucial to sustainability reporting?

Reliable data allows you to show you are making progress, and importantly respond where you are not - as well as meeting the reporting requirements which your organisation will be subject to. Without quality sustainability data, there is no sustainability reporting.

Raising the quality of non-financial data to be on a par with financial data is clearly a mammoth task, but getting this right is crucial. It’s going to mean enhanced data quality, standardised methodologies for data capture and greater assurance requirements. We are going to see a continued focus on improving sustainability data for the years to come.

It’s also important to ensure that businesses are able to meet the growing expectations of investors, who want to understand the true impact of ESG factors on a business. Investors in our recent PwC survey told us that unsupported sustainability claims are one of their biggest concerns.

What data challenges do businesses face?

Across the businesses we work with, we see a lot of commonalities. Some organisations have data gaps, some have the data but they don’t know who owns it and how to manage it, others have the data but it’s siloed across the organisation and relies on really heavily manual processing requirements. Others have a combination of all of those. Now, when technology is available why is this still the case?

The nature of the value chain makes data collection pretty challenging as well. Understanding the solutions available to you to gather data and understand your impact through a supply chain will be really important.

And the level of evidence and confidence needed in data sets to meet maturing assurance requirements and demands of your stakeholders significantly changes the game in terms of what’s expected.

How should businesses approach the data challenge?

Know where the value is.

The key to approaching the data challenge is to just break it down. Take a step-by-step approach to mapping and cleansing the data, automating and replatforming. House it in a way which is secure and flexible to allow for decision making as well as reporting.

I always recommend starting with a data set which, as well as being key to reporting requirements, also holds really strong commercial value. By automating and freeing up your people across the organisation you can focus on higher value activities and really start to unlock value.

Businesses have just got to move away from spreadsheets and towards a tech-powered approach with fully embedded, automated processes and controls that work across the business. That’s going to ensure that you can unlock commercial value, and meet the higher standards that your stakeholders are now demanding.