1174433 - Application of Digital Strategies to Global Environmental and Sustainability Reporting Challenges: How to Manage Environmental Data at a Global Scale with Innovative Digital Solutions

It is becoming glaringly obvious that Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) and Sustainability goals are merging and inherently becoming an inseparable part of our environmental and compliance reporting requirements. Corporations across all industries around the world are being held financially accountable for their multi-media emissions, carbon footprint, and community impacts in more direct ways, such as their effects on stock price fluctuations and executive bonus plans, which directly link to the bottom line more than ever before. This has added additional pressure on data collection, metrics, and analytics requirements, and forecasting trends, upon an already staggering demand on environmental reporting and recordkeeping systems, or what we call Environmental Management Information Systems (EMIS).
In this platform presentation, the author will discuss different strategies that can be applied to collect, manage, and disseminate environmental data for multiple local and global goals around net zero, climate change, renewable energy, GHG mitigation, air, and water pollution, and much more. The core requirements that build the foundation for these data demands lie in the most basic environmental data reporting and recordkeeping that we have been conducting since the dawn of environmental laws and their enforcement. However, even though over the years, the volume and complexity around these laws and their subsequent requirements have grown exponentially, the technologies to help manage and maintain the data have not kept up or have not been given the opportunity of use.
The aim of this presentation is to provide some concepts and strategies around non-traditional workflows, systems, and digital tools to help collect, store, analyze, maintain, and report environmental data. Furthermore, the presentation will provide some key insights into how traditional data requirements around such activities as permitting, reporting, and monitoring can become the building blocks for the global sustainability metrics and ESG goals by using technologies in new and innovative ways.
With the advent of automation, data analytics, and metrics, along with the age-old databases, spreadsheets, and documents, we now have a large repository of tools that can be utilized in interesting, new, and unique ways to help us grab the right information for the right goals, within the right timelines, across multiple channels within our corporate communities, regardless of where they reside, or what their original purpose of use was. Some of the biggest obstacles to the communal use of this information lie within our own limited vision of the data and its use, the fuzzy understanding of the technologies and their capabilities around us, and lack of proper planning prior to the implementation of new systems without first completing a thorough assessment of our requirements, and the ultimate set of goals for the information being captured. All of these are important for us to understand to develop solutions that will not only sustain our basic environmental reporting requirements but also enhance them to meet sustainability metrics and ESG reporting goals that can be scaled up from local to global as and when needed.