Rajesh Gharpure, Global Head- ESG, Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI)
ESG initiatives have become increasingly significant in the business world, with organisations integrating sustainability into their core business strategy and using them as drivers to strengthen resiliency and create long-term value. As a result of this elevated focus, investors now require greater transparency into ESG performance. This means organisations need to make public commitments towards sustainability and provide robust, relevant, and routine updates to their strategies, goals and metrics. They also need to collate accurate ESG data which is critical for making the right capital allocation and investment decisions, and for investors to understand their investment risk and value preservation.
But organisations often struggle to report ESG data effectively. In fact, more than half of leadership across organisations today experience challenges around data availability and data quality. However, with upcoming regulatory changes, such as the European Commission’s Sustainable Financial Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), investment firms need to ensure organisations provide the right data for accurate reporting to support green claims in their ESG-labelled investment funds.
While organisations focus on robust and accurate ESG reporting, it’s not just about trying to report everything, but more about knowing what should be reported. This can be achieved through the focused implementation of the Selection – Innovation – Assurance (S-I-A) approach:
Boundary Selection
It’s important for organisations to continually reassess their ESG journey and establish the correct boundaries through a precise selection process. Selection criteria should categorically define the areas for reporting. A well-planned and executed materiality assessment can help identify areas which are most impactful for business as well as stakeholders. Taking inspiration from the 17 UN SDG goals, alignment with the objectives, jurisdiction, peer benchmarking and geography-specific requirements, organisations need to limit their reporting purview to the most significant topics. By taking a structured programmatic approach, these steps ensure reliable choices are made regarding organisation boundaries, programmes and KPIs, all of which are crucial for an organisation’s long-term sustainability. This is all while taking into consideration the bandwidth and resources needed to ensure proper governance and accurate reporting.
Digital Innovation
Reporting as a means to precisely monitor and govern creates a multitude of challenges as data needs are continually expanding. So it’s important to factor in that large organisations grow both organically and inorganically and, in the process, end up having a wide digital landscape most of which is focussed on primary operational needs and not necessarily targeted towards integrated digital fabric. Organisations often struggle with sourcing the right data as much of the non-operational information is recorded and manually maintained in excel spreadsheets. It is also a question of how to track all the relevant data and compile it in a way that is meaningful and ingestible for generating an ESG report. This means a typical ESG reporting cycle for a mid to large scale organisation can take up to 4-5 months to complete, significantly delaying its ability to monitor and adjust course. Furthermore, the myriad of frameworks and reporting programmes used globally only tend to multiply the problem. Manual data collection also comes with the risk of errors and inaccuracies. It also makes it difficult to scale ESG initiatives and examine transactional data for disclosure purposes.
Through digital intervention, this timeline can be systemically reduced, enabling organisations to quickly adapt and evolve their sustainability programmes and metrics. Usage of digital tools to capture and perform the extract, transform, load (ETL) work before reporting serves the triple purpose of effort and time savings, data validation and reporting accuracy. Taking a productised IT and data product approach focussed on ESG data can help more effectively catalogue data from organisational systems and subsystems into formats needed for reporting and disclosures. This reduces the risk of poor data quality. IoT technologies are capable of tracking and measuring the performance of each individual asset in an operation and data from these platforms can be directly pulled and integrated into such catalogues for ESG reporting purposes and auditing.
Data Assurance
Assurance (internal, followed by external) provides the evidence to support the accuracy of an organisation’s data, and adds the element of truth and trust in your ESG report. The 2021 survey by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), showed that only 51% of the organisations who shared their ESG information, provided assurance with their disclosures. And most of those were limited to certain facets of the total report. However, an ESG report validated by a recognised auditing organisation and verified against an accredited standard provides an impartial overview of performance and compares findings against best practice. This ensures compliance with policies, which gives confidence and security to the investors and reduces the fear of greenwashing. International Standard on Assurance Engagements 3000 (ISAE 3000) and AccountAbility’s (AA) AA1000 Assurance Standard are the dominant standards in the ESG sphere.
However, before you seek external assurance, your leadership need to review the quality and coverage of the data being reported. It should add value by helping to establish a functional ESG control environment and perform a review of the effectiveness of ESG risk assessments and controls. It also adds the benefit of levelling up an organisation’s performance in sustainability-related rating and benchmarking.
Accurate reporting supports decision-making by both investors and taxpayers at one end, and leadership and governing bodies at the other. Organisations should apply the same rigor and checks to ESG reporting, as they do for financial reporting. This can result in increased stakeholder/investor confidence, business value and effectiveness of capital markets.
