What is ESG?
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) are three categories that are measured to evaluate the sustainability and ethical impact of a company’s business practices. ESG reporting is often an aggregation of metrics around these categories that brings visibility to investors, customers, and employees that would want to understand the risks and priorities of an organization and how it aligns with their own goals.
Why ESG is Important?
ESG is important for organizations because it brings visibility into their business practices around issues such as climate change, resource scarcity, social inequality, and general business practices and priorities.
Environmental, social and governance practices of a company are factors that investors, customers, and even employees are researching when they choose to invest, engage or work for a company.
ESG priorities differ across industry and region but reporting on them is frequently a manual and time consuming (costly) process. Additionally, not having real-time visibility and confidence in those metrics puts a company at risk for potential negative environmental, social, or ethical risks that could result in fines, bad press, loss of investors, customers, and top talent. Without real-time and enhanced ESG metrics, organizations often miss out on insights and opportunities that can be capitalized on.
What are the Benefits of ESG reporting?
Real-time visibility, trust, and more precise ESG metrics enables organizations to react immediately to improvements or risk reduction that would positively impact the business. Some of the key benefits for developing environmental, social and governance programs are:
- Showing commitment to environmental improvements around greenhouse gasses, carbon footprint, deforestation, energy and water usage
- Documenting priorities around social diversity, working with under-served communities/minorities, and health/safety practices.
- Visibility around policies that validate the values and ethics of a company such as board diversity, political lobbying, and data privacy.
How Precisely Can Help?
The baseline for ESG reporting is data integrity. Precisely is the leading provider of data integrity solutions that ensures ESG metrics are accurate, consistent and have context.Through our data integrity software, data enrichment products and services, Precisely can provide:
- Automated integration of ESG data across complex environments to enable complete and timely reporting
- Data governance that links data assets to ESG goals and metrics for accelerated identification, reporting, and insights
- Data meaning and lineage to understand impact and relationships across ESG data assets for pro-active opportunity and risk evaluations
- Robust and automated data quality rules to improve trust in ESG metrics and insights
- Enhanced datasets that bring greater insights around climate risks (wildfire, flood plains) and social programs (identify underserved and minority communities)