Driven by laws and regulations, environmental strategy and financing, environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategy and financing funding requirements, the importance of ESG data management can no longer be ignored.

To ensure the future viability of organizations in all industries, effective ESG data management and disclosure is crucial. Yet some major challenges have been highlighted in different forums: lack of alignment of ESG data and performance standards, barriers to data sharing, unclear incentives for ESG data management and disclosure, and lack of coordination.

Opportunities lie in the introduction of ambitious and enforceable regulation, creating clear incentives among ecosystem actors, making results transparent.

Some important gaps are:

ESG standards at the moment are inconsistent and ambiguous.

The incomplete and inconsistent nature of ESG standards complicates the use of ESG data. For example, energy labels are calculated analytically and do not necessarily describe actual energy performance.

Barriers to ESG data interoperability

Data does not flow freely throughout the ecosystem. Stakeholders are sometimes unwilling to share ESG data to mitigate the risk of others gaining a competitive advantage from their data. As a result, the ecosystem as a whole cannot benefit optimally from the available information. Privacy (e.g. GDPR) further complicates the exchange.

Where does data management need to focus? Undoubtedly on quality, governance and integration and interoperability. Most data infrastructures can govern data, but it is often a very manual process, and many of these initiatives are driven by IT programs. Instead, there is a need for a board-level mandate on data, as well as business-driven use cases for tools that automate the process.”

Soon even access to credit will be linked to ESG factors so the industry cannot afford to miss this opportunity.

Italian Roundtable will be moderated by Sofia D’Alessandro (Intesa-Sanpaolo), Spanish RoundTable will be moderated by Gorka Santos Ortells (NTT Data)