Organisations face growing pressure from stakeholders for heightened transparency and a transparent and actionable environmental, social and governance (Sustainability) commitment. There’s pressure too from shifting legislation requiring organisations to disclose sustainability metrics, should they wish to trade overseas within certain markets.
As a result, businesses can no longer rely upon the same manual, informal processes and spreadsheets that often underpin voluntary sustainability reports. Instead, they must capture sustainability data in ways that an auditor can readily examine. And, while some may hold some data sets, they’re currently mainly held for required compliance reporting.
In this article, we’ll explore how sustainability data can be used beyond compliance reporting and drive business growth. We’ll also look at how PwC's Unified Sustainability Hub accelerator can help organisations accelerate these outcomes using modern technologies.
Tangible business benefits
Sustainability reporting can often be seen as a compliance obligation, rather than the gift that it actually is — another way to deliver concrete business benefits. Today’s tech systems can provide insights into the business that help leaders generate savings, improve efficiency, build resilience and ultimately, growth.
Sustainability data can be used by organisations to drive positive brand reputation and bottom line growth in several ways:
Improving transparency and accountability: By disclosing Sustainability data, organisations can demonstrate their commitment to sustainability and ethical practices, which can help build trust with stakeholders and customers. This can lead to positive brand reputation and increased customer loyalty.
Reducing risk: Sustainability data can help organisations identify and mitigate potential risks related to environmental, social and governance issues. By addressing these risks, organisations can avoid negative impacts on their reputation and bottom line.
Identifying opportunities: Sustainability data can also help organisations identify new business opportunities related to sustainability and ethical practices. For example, by investing in renewable energy or reducing waste, organisations can create new revenue streams and improve their bottom line.
Attracting investors: Investors are increasingly interested in Sustainability data when making investment decisions. By disclosing Sustainability data, organisations can attract socially responsible investors who are looking for companies that align with their values. This can lead to increased investment and improved bottom line growth.
Sustainability data can be a valuable tool for businesses to drive growth while also reducing their environmental impact. By analysing sustainability data, businesses can identify areas where they can improve their sustainability practices, reduce waste and save money.
Identify areas for improvement: By analysing sustainability data, businesses can identify areas where they can improve their sustainability practices. For example, they may find that they are using too much energy or water, or that they are generating too much waste. By addressing these issues, businesses can reduce their environmental impact and save money.
Set sustainability goals: Once businesses have identified areas for improvement, they can set sustainability goals to help them achieve their objectives. For example, they may set a goal to reduce their energy consumption by 20% over the next year. By setting goals, businesses can focus their efforts and measure their progress.
Further, organisations can use scope-3 emission data for supplier assessment by analysing the carbon footprint of their supply chain. Scope-3 emissions refer to the indirect emissions that occur in the value chain of an organisation, including emissions from suppliers, transportation, and disposal of products. By analysing the scope-3 emissions of their suppliers, organisations can identify areas where they can reduce their carbon footprint and work with suppliers to implement sustainable practices.
PwC's Unifed Sustainability Hub
PwC’s Unified Sustainability Hub is designed to help organisations leverage the power of data to accelerate their sustainability initiatives, integrating various tools and technologies, including Generative AI, to support companies in measuring, monitoring and optimising their sustainability performance including:
- Intelligent data extraction enables seamless extraction of data from various structured and unstructured sources, such as PDFs, CSV, ERPs etc., eliminating the need for extensive manual efforts, e.g. extraction of emission factors from electricity invoices from across all of your suppliers.
- Scalable carbon accounting converts raw data into emission profiles, from activity data and emission factors to final emissions outcome, serving a range of sustainability use cases.
- Report templates provide pre-built and self-service analytics that enable sustainability stakeholders across the organisation to self-serve their sustainability insights requirements, being able to report, analyse and track sustainability performance.
- Managed edge integration enables granular data capture, such as your electricity usage at 5 to 30 mins intervals, allowing for time-series-based analysis and generation of meaningful and actionable insights to improve efficiency and decision making.
- Generative AI assistant for Sustainability is an intelligent assistant that uses generative AI, to provide real-time insights on your sustainability performance in natural language. Supporting prompt based insights and report delivery for internal and external sustainability stakeholders.
- Forecasting and simulation enables organisations to develop multiple simulations of their sustainability performance to better plan. Further allowing for what-if analysis by exploring various combinations of decarbonisation levers, forecasting scenarios and sustainability goals to make informed decisions to optimise their organisation’s sustainability journey.
- Sustainability planning enables planning of emission reduction targets in line with organisational sustainability goals and to monitor performance against the targets.
- Data exchange enables integration and exchange of data between various stakeholders to enrich the sustainability ecosystem including suppliers, customers and external data exchange platforms.
In combination with our Sustainability and data analytics subject matter expertise, this ‘accelerator’ helps organisations rapidly access, manage and make more informed decisions regarding their sustainability strategies.
If you would like to learn more about how you can best leverage sustainability data, please contact Ankur Goyal, Jahanzeb Azim or Toby Kent.
