It is essential for an organisation to understand the difference between sustainability and ESG reports so that they can ensure that they are fulfilling their goals and communicating in the right ways to their intended audiences.
Sustainability Report
A company’s sustainability report describes the sustainable development topics that are important to the company, why these topics are important (i.e. based on their level of impact on the environment, people and the economy), who they are important to (i.e. stakeholders) and how these topics were identified and selected. They describe the current status of material topics, what the company wants to achieve in relation to these (i.e. its goals, objectives and targets) and why the company want to achieve these items (i.e. putting company sustainable development targets in the context of wider sectoral, local, regional or global sustainable development). They also cover the timeframes within which the company wants to achieve its goals and targets, how it plans to achieve these (i.e. commitments, policies, resourcing, processes, projects, programmes and initiatives) and how these plans are progressing against targets and agreed milestones.
ESG Reports
ESG reports on the other hand, build on sustainability reports by adding an extra layer of economic impact analysis to enterprise sustainable development efforts. When choosing material topics to report on for ESG reports, consideration is also given to the financial or economic impact these topics have on the enterprise (financial materiality) and on its ability to create value.
ESG reports look at value and describe how companies create, add, destroy or erode value through their activities, decisions and relationships, describing how the company plans to remediate negative impact and how they plan to enhance positive value creation through innovation and active pursuit of opportunities.
ESG reports also reflect the importance of strong, ethical, strategic governance and robust due diligence and management structures in achieving global sustainable development goals by describing how the company structure and governance framework empowers and enables the successful achievement of goals.
Access Your Complimentary ESG Report Template
To help enterprises kickstart their sustainability reporting endeavours and significantly reduce the time it takes to produce an informative, quality sustainability and ESG report, we are currently offering STS Report, the reporting component of our STS Sustainability Transformation System as a free download. Simply use the code ‘Welcome100’ at checkout to avail of your 100% discount. By providing templates with detailed guidance and example text, STS Report can help you build a comprehensive and useful sustainability or ESG report that can be used to inform your stakeholders on progress and in turn empower them to assess your performance. STS Report also allows you tailor your report so that it can be used to disclose information required by key international initiatives and reporting standards and frameworks.
