ESG factors have become crucial in attracting investors, retaining customers and maintaining a positive reputation. In this article, we will explore the importance of ESG performance and discuss why it's essential for your business to prioritize it.
Sustainability has become a key topic even for financial institutions, such as banks and insurance companies. Sustainability regulations, in fact, also require these entities to estimate and report risks related to ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) issues.
ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) ratings have become a critical measure of a company's sustainability and ethical practices. An ESG rating measures a company’s exposure to long-term ESG risks, providing investors, stakeholders, and consumers with a way to evaluate a company's performance based on ESG criteria. With the thriving of ESG ratings such as Bloomberg, it has become imperative for companies to measure their impacts and ESG performances through the most effective KPIs choices.
Companies are increasingly expected to demonstrate responsible environmental practices and transparency in their operations to comply with regulations and stakeholders’ increasing requests. Environmental Regulations and Standards encompass a wide range of areas, including emissions control, waste management, resource conservation, and pollution prevention.
To remain competitive in increasingly volatile markets, a company must be able to evolve over time, responding to consumer and workforce needs and offering products and services in line with market paradigms.
The increasing attention given to sustainability issues by regulators, investors, consumers, and many other stakeholders has transformed a company’s ESG performance into a strategic lever for its competitiveness. The benefits of measuring and improving one's ESG performance encompass many aspects: from increased financial stability, to improved brand reputation, to access funding opportunities and projects reserved only for companies that show good ESG performance. Benefits that are as relevant to large companies as they are to SMEs. Despite this, when it comes to ESG performance, companies still encounter several problems concerning metrics and governance.
Sustainability has become a major factor affecting businesses around the world. Through the three dimensions of the Environmental, Social and Governance framework, sustainability has been incorporated into the business activity of many companies and has become an important factor affecting financial decisions. In this context, ESG risks can have a significant impact on the long-term financial performance and reputation of companies.
When it comes to sustainable business transition, one of the first areas that companies need to analyse is their business model. Indeed, the sustainability of the business model is the foundation upon which not only the success of the organization's sustainability strategies depends, but also its competitiveness and, before that, its very viability over time. Regarding the business model, sustainability is analyzed and implemented on the basis of three pillars: the environmental and the social pillars focuses on the impact of the company and its operations, including those that occur upstream and downstream its supply chain, on the environment and the people and communities where the company is located, while the economic pillar refers to the economic sustainability of the model over time. This analysis, as well as the work to streamline and improve the critical issues detected, must consider all aspects that impact the company's business model, as well as all areas impacted by the company. In this journey, ESG plays a primary role, as it helps companies to identify those issues and areas where they need to focus to monitor current performance and develop strategies for improvement.
There is no sustainability strategy that can avoid considering what happens along a company's supply chain. In fact, we know that about 90% of a company's carbon emissions are generated along the supply chain. Despite this, while the number of companies measuring the direct impacts of their operations is increasing, there are still few that measure the impacts associated with everything that happens along the supply chain. This situation is often generated by an undefined and unstructured approach to measuring ESG performance, including unclear governance and accountability, as well as the failure to monitor relevant KPIs. However, failure to monitor supply chain sustainability often comes from the scale of the project. Large companies, for example, are often characterized by long and complex supply chains, which make assessing suppliers’ ESG performance a huge challenge. That is why when it comes to a sustainable supply chain, it is important to rely on the right partners who can help the company deal with all these complexities.
Sustainability reporting has become one of the most relevant practices for organizations willing to prove their value to stakeholders also through their commitment to ESG considerations and environmental issues. There are several sustainability reporting frameworks available to executives, including a few that have become widely used and are backed by international organizations. It is a rapidly evolving set of choices, as an analysis by the Harvard Business review has pointed out. In this context, GRI standards are designed to be an easy-to-use modular set, delivering an inclusive picture of an organization's material topics, their related impacts and how they are managed.