Can carbon reporting be built into financial reporting?
While financial reporting standards may not have significantly changed over the past few years, the ground swell around climate change has seen investors, shareholders and stakeholders looking at both financial and sustainability reporting.
There are various reporting options available to organisations; the ‘narrative’ sections of the annual report, part of the Corporate Social Responsibility report or a standalone carbon report.
To effectively report on the carbon footprint of the organisation, the business needs to be extracting the relevant data from across all systems and sources. There are some obvious ones which are easy to measure and monitor: energy consumption, business miles travelled, waste produced. However, to gain an accurate carbon emission output the business needs to consider key elements in more detail such as the shift to more remote working, impacts on the supply chain and the impact of change on major projects.
Recognising the importance of carbon reporting to our clients, we have been developing apps and reporting which look at different options for clients, whether it be central reporting on major projects or self-service carbon reporting for employees.
What will be interesting post COP26 is whether there is a stronger alignment between financial and sustainability reporting for all companies.
Comments are now closed... Please contact us if you have any queries.