Integrating ESG And Financial Reporting: Three Lessons From Fortune 500 Firms

Integrating ESG And Financial Reporting: Three Lessons From Fortune 500 Firms

With the majority of organizations submitting sustainability reports annually, firms are increasingly embedding ESG within corporate strategies and business decisions. This means that business leaders need to quantify and disclose the influence of ESG factors on financial decisions, which will protect the accuracy and integrity of their sustainability and financial reporting.

To guide corporates facing this challenge, the Verdantix best practices report on integrating ESG and financial reporting evaluates 20 Fortune 500 firms that are globally recognized for their sustainability commitments and performance. We learned that to successfully integrate ESG and financial reporting: 

• Financial metrics must be in line with sustainability metrics.
  As a resilience strategy, firms should address the likelihood and magnitude of ESG risks in the context of their financial performance, specifically identifying the material impact on business operations. During this process, organizations might embark on transformational processes that generate opportunities for risk mitigation, efficiency and innovation. Firms with leading sustainability performance have enhanced these processes by breaking down information silos, centralizing sustainability data and developing metrics that reflect the social and environmental dividends of operations. As an example, firms such as Alphabet and Iberdrola disclose the economic impact of their operations in terms of job creation. For these businesses, connecting ESG and sustainability objectives and impacts with financial performance is a long-term value process that generates innovation, resilience and financial health.
  
  
• Firms need to explicitly connect investment and spend with ESG objectives and principles.
  ESG goals need strong board-level engagement and buy-in from different teams, with a range of departments approaching ESG and sustainability issues from their own perspective and scope. In integrated reports, firms should disclose how they consider ESG in their investment and market positioning strategies. For example, leading organizations such as Vestas – which operates in the energy and utilities sector – may disclose R&D spend as a support of corporate commitment to sustainability. Additionally, firms such as Apple and Samsung highlight their strong approach to ESG and sustainability principles, often expanding the scope of their sustainability reports to cover the influence of ESG issues on related economic expenditures such as lobbying activities and taxes paid.
  
  
• ESG and financial reports should reflect executives’ accountability.
  Sustainability plans do not survive without transparent reporting. Hence, firms should avoid any contradictions between financial and ESG reporting that would result in greenwashing accusations. This can be done by disclosing board and executives’ incentives and accountability against sustainability performance. For example, AstraZeneca discloses internal processes for executive remuneration based on net zero and sustainability targets. Also, firms aiming to have the highest reporting standards must verify ESG and financial performance, making independent ESG assurance critical to protect organizations’ compliance, credibility and integrity.
  
  

Strategies to integrate ESG and financial performance may vary across different industries, but these steps remain crucial for all organizations to provide a pragmatic and transparent view of ESG performance. Ultimately, firms must bear in mind that ESG and financial reporting are complementary reflections of overall business health.