ESG and Compliance: Where do we go from here?

Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) issues are growing in importance for nearly all businesses. ESG is a hot topic these days, but how does compliance to regulations, standards and EHS requirements fit into the ESG puzzle?

Agenda

This webinar will discussed how growing ESG requirements will impact the need for better compliance programs, data gathering and rapid reporting.

• Presentation of Nimonik 2021 State of Compliance Survey Results
• Discussion of ESG trends
• How does compliance underpin ESG

Details

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) is becoming an increasingly important subject for institutional investors. This has put pressure on boards and upper management to evaluate their systems and performance. Sometimes, in a rush to meet investor requirements, ESG reports are packaged together without a robust data, reporting and planning process underpinning them. A recent report explained that,

“Ultimately, these disclosures are just the beginning. Once an organization uses its ESG data to understand its current state, it can establish or improve a formal ESG program, with a set budget and KPIs. As ESG moves away from a box checking exercise towards legal requirement, organizations need to be certain they have the structures and processes in place to allow them not only to comply, but to thrive.”

Organizations will need to provide greater assurance and integrity of their monitoring and reporting of ESG data and this includes compliance related data. We could think of this as reporting of financial statements but without having accounting standards.

Auditing of ESG disclosure requirements will be needed and since there are few formal regulations right now, organizations must conduct their own assessments and trace them back to stakeholder obligations.

Compliance will see an increased role and we have seen an increased need from businesses to implement robust compliance programs to underpin their ESG programs. The future of EHS regulations and standards may be for them to include more robust and broader ESG disclosures than what has been required in the past.