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Many companies use the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a point of reference for their sustainability initiatives and actions. Reporting on these goals requires collecting, processing, and interpreting substantial amounts of data (e.g., on emissions or recycled materials) that were previously neither captured nor analyzed. Data availability, access and quality are particularly urgent issues when reporting on sustainability initiatives becomes mandatory and requires the audit of the reported information, as imposed under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) from the European Union (EU). In this presentation, we analyze the data practices in more than 10 multinational companies and find that sustainability-related data requirements are mostly addressed in an ad-hoc manner. Building up data management capabilities is key for moving from ad-hoc reactivity to proactive sustainability. We outline a data management framework for sustainability and provide examples and recommendations, specifically for data sourcing practices, sustainability data products and data stewardship for sustainability.

Speaker

Christine Legner

Professor, Director Competence Center Corporate Data Quality (CC CDQ), University of Lausanne