Data management for ESG: keep accurate, accessible, well-governed data to achieve your sustainability goals
Climate reporting and sustainability present a daunting challenge to anyone responsible for them. The common obstacles are often overwhelming. An enterprise level business is operationally diverse and often elaborate, and its suppliers and value chain are extensive. Changing fundamental methods, practices, materials, or supply chains takes investment of time as well as budget. Even with vast amounts of data and information to use, arriving at a figure for something like carbon emissions can be gruelling and uncertain.
The answer to all of those is better data.
Better data management for effective sustainability
83% of organisations can’t access the data they need to report their sustainability metrics. Naturally, if you don’t have the data to report your sustainability, you also don’t have the data you need to improve it. Data inaccessibility has been a fundamental obstacle for organisations, and the larger the organisation, the more difficult it often becomes. One of the most common root causes is a lack of Data Governance.
Data Governance keeps data secure, accurate, available, and usable, wherever it is stored and whatever it is used for. It creates consistency in storage, format, and stewardship. Without it, teams, departments, and individuals often organically develop their own data cultures, storing data in places and formats that suit them, meaning relevant information is nigh-on impossible to consolidate on a business-wide level. Gathering the necessary information to report on sustainability, to assess its current state, or to benchmark improvements is unachievable without Data Governance.
Add to that, about 75% of a typical organisation’s carbon impact comes from scope 3 emissions (the emissions from the value chain). Understanding, improving, and reporting those emissions requires standardised and well-governed data, both so that any data that suppliers share and submit is easy to incorporate into your own figures, and so that it you make it as easy as possible for partners to supply the data required.
How data helps to avoid greenwashing
EU figures suggest that 53% of green claims are ‘vague, misleading or unfounded’, and that 40% ‘have no supporting evidence’. On that basis, the proposed Directive on Green Claims aims to force companies to substantiate and verify any green claims they make on their products or in their communications.
Whether or not that proposal becomes law, and whether or not your operations come under EU jurisdiction, greenwashing is increasingly part of consumer and legislative consciousness. Data can help you avoid inadvertently greenwashing, and can protect you from accusations of having committed it.
For example, duplicate data is a common but extremely serious barrier to accurate reporting. Human error, the poor integration of data systems, and non-standardised formatting can all result in data being absent or duplicated. That can easily become a more flattering sustainability picture than the true facts present, which can lead to accidentally inaccurate claims, or a misleading assessment of where and how environmental improvements are most urgent.
Data should have its own sustainability targets
Most enterprise-level businesses (63%) store over 100 terabytes of data. Storing one terabyte for a year generates about 160kg of CO2 emissions. That is 16 tonnes of CO2 every year simply from storing data. Another reality is that 70% of a business’s stored data is redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT). That could be upwards of 70 terabytes eliminated, and with it at least 11.2 tonnes of carbon emissions. Eliminating ROT data involves identifying it (through automation or audit), deleting it, and preventing it recurring through better data management.
If ROT data is undermining your ESG initiatives, you are struggling to arrive at trustworthy ESG data, or you are finding it difficult to use your data to measure and improve your sustainability, Agile can help you deliver measurable ESG results. We help enterprise organisations modernise, manage, and monetise their data, with the strategy and governance, platforms and engineering, and analytics and visualisation to unlock the power of data for good.
To speak to a data expert about unlocking your data’s power for your ESG initiatives, call 01908 010618 or contact us here.