Corporate sustainability reporting has for too long been done manually and infrequently. In the process, organisations potentially rely on inaccurate or out-of-date estimations of the complex systems they report on.  Too often an Excel spreadsheet carries the burden of assisting organisation-wide change and deliver net zero emissions in line with 1.5C of warming by 2050.

All due to the fact that collecting sustainability data has been routinely challenging and reporting it has been time-consuming. In most cases, it still is.

The growing importance of greenhouse gas (GHG), energy, and sustainability reporting makes it necessary to change to faster, more accurate data collection for precise, actionable reporting that can help all organisations achieve their net zero targets.

Without a change in data collection systems, organisations face the potential of reputational, legal, or market risk. Financial data, incentives, and sustainability information are now linked. Failure to report accurately and on time means stakeholders are unable to judge the legitimacy and effectiveness of their sustainability projects, while investors become restless as ESG requirements are not evidenced. The way forward is near real-time data collection.

 APIs for organisation-wide data collection and sustainability reporting frameworks

 Sustainability reporting is hungry for data. What it consumes comes from a sweeping range of sources.  More often than not this data has been siloed in different systems and only accessible through manual extraction and input somewhere else. The infrequency means anything collected is quickly out-of-date and inaccurate.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) frees that data from manual, siloed systems by automatically collecting and storing it in a centralised system. This helps overcome the silos created by slow and difficult collection methods. APIs effectively work as a call and response between two systems that previously couldn’t talk to one another. The process is automatic, near real-time, and helps to ensure the right data is in the right place at the right time.

 The benefits of near real-time sustainability data collection

Regulations change, sometimes faster than expected, requiring those responsible for sustainability reporting to respond accurately despite the ‘shifting goalposts’. Near real-time data collection helps organisations keep pace with any potential regulatory or reporting changes that happen, ensuring accuracy and agility.

In addition to changing regulations, near real-time data collection helps to hedge against many potential risks. For example, resource and financial risks, such as the efficiency of energy use and its costs, can be monitored closely, and having near real-time insight helps to mitigate them before they materialise into full-blown problems. This helps to build sustainability frameworks that ties sustainability data into the organisation’s wider strategy and operations.

Organisations can also closely monitor their wider strategies, including sustainability and net zero goals, by collecting near real-time data and tracking KPIs too. Having insight into their current performance, rather than an out-of-date months-old performance snapshot, presents an opportunity to monitor progress towards important milestones along the way to their strategic goals. This empowers decision makers to change tactics long before the organisation has failed to meet a goal and can help form narratives that appeal to investors and other stakeholders. (see below)

Near real-time upstream supply chain data and market differentiation

Near real-time data collection that’s effectively outside of an organisation’s system boundaries is much harder to collect. For GHG emissions, this has become known as the problem of Scope 3 emissions because Scope 3 is everything up- and downstream in a supply chain.

Near real-time data can help to partially overcome this issue while setting the business apart from its competition. An organisation’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions, everything it does directly, are effectively its customer’s Scope 3 emissions. By getting better quality, near real-time data on its operations organisations can make their business more attractive to others with sustainability targets. Near real-time data collection within an organisation makes it easier for other organisations to report their data as part of their own supply chain.

 In the long run, near real-time data supports competitiveness and business reputation, and lets organisations track progress towards carbon neutrality and net zero. By integrating sustainability frameworks and GHG software, the speed of data collection available now can overcome operational hurdles and give investors and stakeholders confidence.