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These resources will help you to revisit your company’s efforts and progress towards its sustainability commitments and to achieving its purpose by verifying progress thus far, determining whether changes are required, and making adjustments as necessary.
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Drafted by the PRI, this comprehensive paper was created to help companies that want to advance their confidence-building measures for external reporting. Such verification highlights areas for improvement; identifies risks and opportunities in internal data collection and reporting mechanisms; and increases confidence in the quality of sustainability-related information disclosed. This report identifies and explores a phased, three-pronged approach to implementing confidence-building measures: using an internal control system, an internal audit of the control system, and external third party assurance.
There is growing need for ESG data that investors, lenders, and other financiers can rely on. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and FSR-Danish Auditors have published this guide to provide practical suggestions on how companies can improve the quality of (and confidence in) their ESG information by considering the fundamentals of internal controls. This guide will help you to present the business case for improving the quality of ESG information for decision-making; identify and understand necessary improvements; and make changes to benefit data quality, reporting, and monitoring.
This report may be helpful if you are thinking about obtaining external assurance (from accountancy firms, engineering firms, sustainability services firms, etc.) for your organisation's next sustainability report. It covers the assurance process, potential outcomes of assurance, and assurance standards.
Assurance provides external validation of the financial, social, and environmental disclosures made within reports, and helps to enhance the credibility for lenders, creditors, investors, and other concerned parties. This report from WBCSD explains how disclosure can be enhanced by obtaining independent assurance statements, and provides key guidance from leading assurance providers and standard setters to help sustainability practitioners navigate the assurance landscape. It includes a multi-stage Assurance Maturity Model, which will help you to understand where your company is positioned; outline opportunities for improvement at each stage of the journey; and advance the maturity and clarity of your practices, commitments, and achievements.
This tool from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) can help you better understand how purpose-driven your business is. The Business Transformation Framework groups businesses into progressive categories: short-term self-interest; long-term self-interest (developing); long-term self-interest (mature); and purpose-driven. The self-reflective diagnostic tool can help you place your business along this continuum, as per an assessment indicators that includes organisational values, senior leadership, and financial management. This resource will be most useful to business leaders, change managers, and sustainability professionals seeking to drive business transformation.
This practical guide published by CDP can help you understand the business benefits of independently verifying environmental data and how to go about it. The guide outlines five business benefits of verification, lays out the verification process for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and explains how to ensure best practice with special attention to Scope 3 emissions. It also provides a note on verifying water and forests-related data, and highlights corporate reporting and verification trends across geographies. The guide will be most useful to sustainability and compliance professionals.
Many organisations are expected - or required - to independently verify their GHG data through third parties. This extra level of assurance builds confidence in the methods used by the organisation to calculate GHG emissions, while also standardising the data in a way that fosters comparability and transparency for carbon accounting and reporting. This new guide from AccountAbility can help you to review and verify your greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Designed to complement the AA1000 Assurance Standard v3, the guide focuses on the processes required for responsible and complete assurance engagements based on the AccountAbility Principles of Inclusivity, Materiality, Responsiveness, and Impact. It explains preconditions for an AA1000AS v3 engagement; the approach for conducting such an engagement; and how to issue an AA1000AS v3 assurance statement and optional report to management. This resource will be of particular benefit to any professionals involved in collecting, managing, and reporting climate-related information.
As companies improve their processes to reduce human rights risks and impacts, they need ways to assure that these processes are having the intended effects. Complementing the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), this guidance can help internal auditors assure companies’ human rights performance and support external assurance providers’ assurance of companies’ human rights reporting. The guidance is divided into four parts. Part 1 provides an introduction to the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework, including a backgrounder and information on the rationale, intended users, and objectives; Part 2 explains how this guidance builds upon existing standards, discusses necessary competencies for expert practitioner teams when conducting assurance, and highlights factors of heightened importance for human rights assurance; Part 3 provides expert conclusions; Part 4 explains the structure and content of the indicators and can help users identify the relevant types of evidence for assuring a company's human rights performance or reporting; and Part 5 provides a glossary of terms.
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