No matter what industry you’re in, sustainability-related risks and opportunities affect your business and the world in which your business operates. But how you measure them, talk about them, and make decisions based on them in relation to your sustainable business strategy can make a world of difference—on people, on the planet, and on your bottom line.
At PwC, our community of solvers take a connected business approach to sustainability reporting. We work alongside you to embed sustainability across your existing reporting systems, integrating technology that enables more insightful decision-making, as well as regulatory compliance—focusing strategy development on business growth and value-creation.
Building trust, improving performance, and creating value
As more companies aim to reach net zero goals, more disclosures are being mandated—for example, by the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Many organisations around the world will be reporting to sustainability standards released by the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), as adopted in Brazil and expected in many more territories. But it’s not just regulators who care about organisations’ sustainability affairs on people and the planet. Investors, consumers, and employees are all demanding more transparent, reliable, high-quality sustainability information to make decisions—and organisations need to be ready to share theirs.
It can be challenging for businesses to see how they improve data and reporting capabilities in a complex and fast-evolving reporting landscape.
Leaders that manage to get it right will have an advantage for value creation, meeting emerging compliance and stakeholder needs, while also providing the right insights to manage their own sustainability risks and performance.
Manage and measure real sustainability progress
Starting with the decisions and disclosures your business needs to make, we can help you identify and implement the right reporting strategy. By looking at your operations within your social and natural environment, we are able to respond holistically. We will make suggestions on changes you need to make to report on risk, opportunity and impact.
Organisations today must navigate how complex environmental and social risks and opportunities impact entire business operations. Integrating sustainability across a wide range of day to day business activities; procurement, operations, workforce etc. requires a holistic approach. Managing key metrics and indicators allow decisions to be made in a connected effort to achieve high performance and improve efficiencies, profitability and impact.
Organisations need dependable and holistic reporting systems, to manage granular data and deliver reliable reporting at the right level for disclosure or decision making. This might be entity, regional, product or portfolio level—within the business and across its value chain. As you progressively seek more value and opportunity from data and reporting, you face additional challenges—overlaying data to model different scenarios, forecasting and predictive capabilities, increased collection and storage of data, and integrating data from different business areas. Bringing tech systems and supporting business processes up to regulatory and decision making standards is complicated and can involve a lot of work. It requires integrating and augmenting existing finance and reporting systems with sustainability-specific modules and functions. Embedding technology into reporting solutions introduces clarity, efficiency and reliability into complex data environments.
Failure to adapt to sustainability risks and opportunities is a losing strategy for business - and reporting will show who is creating value from environmental, social and governance (ESG) opportunities, and who is at risk. Businesses are looking to increase their capability in mitigating risk and managing disruption, building resilience into business processes by using data and metrics to give insight into how sustainability factors affect business outcomes.
When data overlays are combined with value-creation strategies, opportunities for adaptation and growth are more easily identified. These insights influence decisions on capital investment, new markets, product portfolios and strategies that have a bearing on enterprise value and cost of capital.
Being transparent in your reporting, sharing information that is relevant, and reliable, builds trust. This starts with a clear understanding of the regulations applicable to your organisation and industry. The next step is to gather the information to meet stakeholder expectations. Strong systems, governance, processes and controls helps establish that compliance and disclosure obligations are met with efficiency, trust, transparency and reliability. By raising transparency on how your organisation’s behaviour leads to outcomes, its progress on pledges, whether driven by climate change or other sustainability factors, you can build trust with your stakeholders and create more value over time.
Unlock value through human-led, tech enabled sustainability reporting
- Regulatory response
- Data and digital
- Transformation
Regulatory response
End-to-end support for companies as they respond to regulatory reporting requirements.
Assess: Maturity assessments and benchmarking to understand current capabilities. Materiality assessments and scoping that refines your reporting priorities and wider regulatory obligations, including tax and legal requirements. Gap assessments that identify areas for improvement and regulatory gaps. Then design a reporting solution and a roadmap to get there.
Define: Introducing data sources and flows for external reporting and internal management of material sustainability topics and designing processes and advising on systems to integrate into existing reporting routines. Using technology to bring clarity, efficiency and reliability into complex regulatory and data disclosure and tagging environments.
Implement and refine: Operating models and workforce that embed an effective reporting function. Reporting routines aligned to your regulatory cycle. Governance, processes and controls that underpin relevant and reliable reporting, and prepare you for independent assurance.
Data and digital
Automation that improves the efficiency and performance of your reporting - to improve analysis, decision making and forecasting in what are very complex business dynamics.
Data solutions that improve the collection, storage and use of high quality, complex data sets from across your business. Integrating sustainability data into your reporting systems, working with leading technology companies in emerging innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) to enable intelligent analytics and predictive capability for holistic business management.
Our solutions combine data and reporting expertise with powerful technology - enablers that optimise your performance management and reporting capability.
Transformation
Sometimes adaptation strategies demand a more thorough reinvention of your business model.
Use insights gained from your reporting to deliver a coherent sustainability strategy and drive the resulting transformation. Our solutions bring advisors with the collective expertise to solve business issues using an end-to-end, connected business response. A high performance and value-driven approach that is brought together in reinvention and business transformation services.
Sustainability reporting case studies
PwC has helped some of the largest organisations across the globe with their sustainability reporting, from measuring and analysing carbon emissions in global marine solutions, transportation, and logistics to unlocking the value of ESG data for a global pharmaceutical company.
