How to make an automatic ESG Report: What you can / cannot automate

Automatic ESG Reporting: Wouldn’t it be great if you could just click a button and everything you need for your automatic ESG report was there ready to publish? Creating an automatic Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) report is a strategic move to streamline sustainability reporting, reduce manual effort, and enhance accuracy. Automation allows companies to gather data from various sources, analyse metrics in real time, and generate reports aligned with ESG standards and stakeholder expectations. While automating EVERY aspect of an ESG report is not yet possible, this article will help you with what you can and cannot automate. 

What you can automate for your ESG report? 

At Nossa Data, our aim is to help companies streamline their ESG reporting and we are glad to say there are a ton of aspects of ESG reporting that can be automated. What do we believe are the top x3 areas to automate: 

X1: Choosing what ESG metrics to report on. With a plethora of ESG frameworks on the market there is no need for a company to choose their own unique set of metrics. Many companies are hit by ESG regulation whether it is CSRD or IFRS. If you are not impacted by regulation, you can still use those frameworks as a starting point or leverage frameworks such as SASB and GRI. 

X2: Analysing your peers reports: AI is a great way to run an analysis of your peers ESG reports to get a comprehensive understanding of what they are saying. This can also help you understand data requirements from ESG Rating agencies to ensure you have comprehensive disclosure overall. Some benefits: 

• Quickly see how your disclosure compares to peers
• Extract full sentences for peer reports
• Query how peers disclose on specific topics from transition planning to cybersecurity

X3: Assigning data collection tasks to stakeholders and collecting audit information: One of the best aspects of ESG reporting to automate is data collection tasks from internal groups and systems from your organisation. Included in this you can create rules to collect audit information as you go. No more complicated email chains and excels. 

X4: Leveraging ESG information between frameworks: After publishing your initial report, there are many ways to use AI and other tools to extract information between your corporate reporting and streamline responses to frameworks such as CDP, Ecovadis or the ESG rating agencies. 

Want to use Nossa Data to create an automatic ESG Report? Get in touch and we will share more. 

What you cannot automate for your ESG report? 

Picking your ESG targets: If you are going to publicly communicate ESG targets as an organisation be sure that you are choosing material, strategic targets for your organisation. 

Education to internal stakeholders about ESG: A common role of ESG teams is to educate internal stakeholders about the rapidly changing universe of ESG requirements. 

Final report signoff: We always encourage to have an individual have final sign off for public disclosure. AI can be very good at writing things “A little bit wrong” which can create a large risks for listed companies. 

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