💫5 ways to make your sustainability report valuable to your business beyond compliance

This is the monthly newsletter from Bemari where we talk about how not to get lost in sustainability. This month we explore the value of sustainability reporting and why it is not just about ticking the boxes and compliance. 

Sustainability reporting is a big topic that often dominates the panel discussions, remains a concern for many sustainability practitioners and is almost something of a “marmite” issue.

In this newsletter we want to offer a few considerations that may help teams to optimise value from sustainability reports, and the process of preparing them. These are not quick and easy activities, so if you are going to spend time, effort and resources, they should serve more than a compliance obligation fulfilment.

Sustainability reporting is not just a showcase of progress for regulatory compliance. Done thoughtfully, reports can serve multiple strategic purposes not just for the company but the sector they work in (and sometimes even beyond).

• Public accountability: it is a chance to publicly declare intentions, targets and progress, and therefore the need to demonstrate progress. These can be particularly helpful for the in-house sustainability teams - it is a powerful motivation for the business to continue the momentum

• Transparency builds trust and strengthens reputational standing, giving stakeholders confidence. Investors, customers, potential employees may be seeking certain information that informs their decisions about the business, so without it the business may be missing out. Many ESG rating systems rely on public disclosure to calculate scores.

• Stakeholder engagement: reports create opportunities for a dialogue with investors, customers, communities and NGOs, through storytelling and demonstration how the business aligns with their interests, values and demands. This might also be a source of criticism, but this is part of the dialogue.

• Opportunity for learning and reflection: having to put together the content for the previous year does make you start reflecting on what the business, achieved, learned, and what the important messages might be that it wants to communicate to the audience. Having to condense it into sections, numbers and keep it snappy provides an opportunity to take stock, especially if you look at the year on year story.

• Industry leadership: Transparent reporting demonstrates what can be achieved to the industry and raises the bar. This serves not only as an important inspiration for others to see what is possible, but also gives an overview of the latest technologies, practices, solutions and challenges making it easier for more organisations to integrate these. Most business do not want to be lagging behind, not many may want to lead the way after, so seeing what the middle ground looks like is a good motivation for many to keep progressing. This way the sector can move forward faster.

• Drives action: the simple reality is that if there is a sustainability requirement, it is a driver for businesses to look into and act on areas they would not do otherwise. This might not always be sufficient but it is more than may happen without it and faster than the voluntary action - and whilst we need both, mandatory requirements provide in-house sustainability practitioners with a good business case to drive discussions and projects that are needed to address sustainability topics. Reporting is not the end product, it is a catalyst and a tool.

So how might the reports be engaging and deliver business value, rather than end up on the shelf?

1.Define the purpose of your report.

Before diving into data collection and design, articulating the purpose of the report can drive what you put into it, and the name you may give it will also frame the content. If you want to communicate environmental and social achievements and impact (positive and negative) to partners and customers, you are most likely to use an Impact report. These very often (but not always) may not speak to the business strategy, risks and opportunities and be published separately to financial and strategic reports.

There may also be Sustainability, Responsibility, CSR and Sustainable development reports. These all signal to the readers what the content might be and who it is targeted to.

Conversely, ESG report may emphasise risks and opportunities and speak to an investor or business audience. These may often be drier and focus on numbers rather than storytelling.

Increased trend towards integrated reporting gives an opportunities for the business to start viewing sustainability matters as business matters, not a parallel activity. This lens may be more helpful in opening spaces for meaningful conversation with core business functions and demonstrating the business value of sustainability topics. This is the direction in which reporting frameworks such as CSRD, TCFD/ISSB and TNFD are going. In these types of report, splitting the content in clear sections for different audiences will help make the most of one report for multiple purposes.

2.Make it real and useful. Make the report work for you in multiple ways:

• Align to recognised frameworks such as CSRD, ISSB, VSME to build confidence and trust. If a report of a larger organisation is not aligned to an existing good practice framework, it might raise questions of what is not included or not considered. Smaller ones may use the frameworks as inspiration for structure and content, but frameworks do not always have to mean full compliance, complexity and endless data collection.

• Stories are effective - people are more likely to recall information when its wrapped in an anecdote as opposed to statistics. Make stats more memorable by embedding them in a story.

• Get to the point: highlight and make clear key messages, takeaways, wins, actions to be taken. For example, “How our customers can help support our goals”, “How to contact us for partnership”, “Download data”, “Provide feedback”.

• Signpost sections for different audiences by clearly indicating where the information can be found, what is included, who each section serves whether it is financial information for investors, success stories for guests, or strategic insights for partners. For example, you can showcase your new on-site renewable energy project through a brief story with visuals for customers and partners, and show the data and tables on energy transition for investors in a different section of the report.

3.Do not fear acknowledging unmitigated negative impacts. We are at the point where reports that suggest that everything is perfect and is on track may not be seen as authentic. It is well understood that sustainability topics are not easy to tackle, so sharing challenges, areas where progress is slower than it was hoped, all contributes to trust and offers a more realistic perspective.

It is more useful for readers to see that there is no perfection, and understand the reasons for this as well - so more organisations feel comfortable to be transparent and try different ideas. For example, as the new topic of Nature & Biodiversity comes up in reporting requirements, it is more helpful to acknowledge the importance of the issue and the actions taken or planned to be taken, rather than not talk about it at all. Absence of information may suggest absence of action, which may not always be the case.

4.Eyes get eyes

Using human faces and telling human stories makes the content more relatable. Show the real employee images, actual suppliers and projects, and name the people in them - this helps build connection and bring the story to life. Who made my clothes? campaign by Fashion revolution was a powerful demonstration of how people get more engaged in stories with real people, and want to become part of supporting people they feel they know.

Humans are wired to seek out faces and pay more attention to them - whether it is an actual face or just reminds of it. Some brands noticed that content that contained eyes - human, animals or anything that reminds of it - had better engagement rates and more views.

5. Avoid green cuteness overload

Green has been overdone - move beyond generic imagery of nature, plants and greenery. The green/ nature-inspired imagery not connected to the actual content of the report could count as an implicit claim about your brand’s environmental credentials under the various greenwashing legislation, in particular in the UK and the EU where Green claims codes have been quite specific that implicit claims may also be perceived to be misleading.

If you do use greenery, specify what it is, like you do with giving credit to the artists or IP used - start making nature more understood!

Give nature credit! Nature is a creator that we have not necessarily been acknowledging as such. CSRD now specifies that Nature is a silent stakeholder and therefore has to be considered as part of impact and dependencies assessment. So let’s use the same logic to acknowledge the contribution nature provides in other areas inspired by Nature as an Artist! initiative, developed by Sounds Right, Spotify and AKQA to let Nature earn royalties that will be used for its own conservation.

For your toolkit

• The Impact reporting archive - examples of impact reports for inspiration and ideas

• CSRD reports library - CSRD reports published since the directive has come into force, compiled Sustainability Reporting Navigator.

• Best practice examples on sustainability reporting from the UK Gov - focus on climate reporting including TCFD

Bemari update
🎯 We have joined the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) Corporate Engagement programme and are a listed Expert Service provider for setting SBTN targets for Nature. If you are exploring how to set science-based targets for Nature for your business, get in touch via [email protected].

📣 Bemari is now a member of London Chamber of Commerce & Industry and British Chamber of Commerce Dubai, so if you are in any of these, please get in touch to say hi!

Meme of the month

Recap of Good News this month

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💫 That’s it for this month. We hope it sparks a change for you and your organisation - we would love to hear what change it is. Let us know!

Is there an advice that has been very helpful to you and you think others would find helpful too? Please share by emailing [email protected].

_{(Our newsletter image was created by a human, Rory Lawrence from WayMoby).}