How to move an organisation’s sustainability reporting ambition from compliance to leadership

Taking an organisation’s sustainability reporting from the bare minimum to a differentiated, market-leading position requires planning. There is a motivation for organisations that choose to focus on compliance when it comes to sustainability reporting.

For some organisations, the implementation journey is in its early phase, and therefore their reporting will also reflect the maturity of their overall sustainability journey.

Other organisations are still building capacity, making the necessary investments and determining their sustainability business case.

While these are valid reasons to take a compliance-focused approach to sustainability reporting, organisations cannot remain at a compliance-only level permanently.

Organisations that take a business-case lens to sustainability adoption, and intend to derive full utility from their reporting, will have to set their reporting ambition at the market-leadership level at which the organisation can attract investors.

One important step is to ensure sustainability reporting is deployed internally across an organisation to monitor, manage and measure risks and opportunities, and to preserve value.

Organisations should embed sustainability across their management structures. Sustainability needs to be applied internally in order to build credibility for the transition to leadership in reporting. Paying lip service to sustainability would prevent an organisation from achieving leadership in reporting.

Another important aspect to consider is integrating sustainability in the tools and systems used across every level of the organisation for decision-making.