Investor-grade data is a crucial element of ESG management. To be truly useful, however, that information must be distilled into actionable insights through analytics. Effective and accurate reporting helps you access these insights by providing a framework to identify patterns, trends and key factors that will inform your decision making.
Inevitably, you’ll spend time and resources capturing and managing ESG data, but to make a real difference, analysis and insight needs to be accessible in real-time. In this blog, we take a look at some of the compelling reasons to prioritize ESG reporting and how real-time tracking can help your organization reduce risk and progress rapidly towards your sustainability goals.
making progress in real-time
Gone are the days of relying on disconnected excel documents or static year-end reports to guide strategy and operations. Future-focused organizations know that tracking progress with ongoing, real-time reporting is really what’s required to drive successful ESG management.
Sustainability managers and stakeholders therefore need access to information on-demand to be best informed when making operational decisions that align with their ESG strategy and goals. Not least because figuring out you didn’t you meet any of your ESG goals at the end of a reporting season is not very useful.
reporting frameworks underpin comparison
Companies are not working in isolation however. Progress against company targets is essential, but organizations also function within a global regulatory or legislative environment, which is often increasingly stringent.
Recently, regulations such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) have been passed making ESG reporting mandatory for companies operating in particular industry sectors or countries. This trend towards more stringent reporting is mirrored in other regions across the globe and although reporting remains voluntary for some, requirements are likely to change in the not-too-distant future. Ready or not, regulation will affect most organizations soon.
Although the landscape of ESG frameworks, standards, and ranking is vast and often difficult to navigate, there is a definite need for harmonization. Uniform metrics provide us with a shared ESG language that eases communication and comparison.
Benchmarking also allows organizations to understand how they’re faring in the industry and identify areas of strength or necessary improvement. If you don’t know how you compare in the market, do you really understand your overall organizational health? Reporting to a framework or standard that is relevant to your industry or implementing a ranking tool like CSRHub can help clarify how your ESG performance stacks up.
prioritizing your sustainability journey
If you’re not yet reporting to an ESG standard or framework, your ESG data still matters and reporting this continues to be vital at an organizational level. What that looks like will vary for different companies but working to set and achieve sustainability goals has several benefits.
Beyond the growing pressure for sustainability considerations and transparency from investors, conscious consumers, governments, and other stakeholders, organizations that prioritize ESG are often more resilient overall. ESG provides a toolkit for companies to work smarter and increase their agility.
A comprehensive understanding of your ESG progress will help your organization to identify opportunities for efficiency and growth while mitigating risk. It enables you to recognize whether your business objectives are aligned with your strategy and for forward-focused organizations, to track this progress using established internal KPIs.
So, as uncertainty over the future increases – whether political, economic, or climate-related – it’s clear that the need for smart ESG management is not going away. The time to prioritize your ESG reporting is now.
If you feel overwhelmed by the ESG reporting landscape, AMCS can help. Our comprehensive AMCS ESG Solution simplifies ESG reporting, updating automatically to current frameworks and standards to ensure compliance with mandatory disclosures and help you keep on track with mission critical KPIs.