TECH & AI
HOW IS THE GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY LANDSCAPE CHANGING FOR BUSINESSES? The pace is accelerating. Companies can no longer remain passive. Between CSRD in Europe, CBAM, forthcoming state climate reporting initiatives in the US and ISSB standards globally, extra-financial reporting is becoming non-negotiable.
But it’ s also a strategic opportunity: aligning the entire value chain with a credible decarbonisation path.
WHAT CHALLENGES DOES THIS PRESENT? The challenges begin with the rapidly evolving and fragmented regulatory landscape: businesses must navigate a growing array of overlapping requirements – CSRD, CBAM, the EU Taxonomy, ISSB standards and others – each with its own definitions, boundaries
and reporting deadlines. Multinational companies, in particular, struggle to reconcile these divergent rules across regions( for example, CSRD in Europe, SECR in the UK and forthcoming state climate reporting initiatives in the US), making it difficult to establish a single, coherent reporting process.
Compounding this is the fragmentation of data: emissions-related information is often scattered across disparate systems – ERPs, accounting software, procurement platforms – and consolidating it requires laborious, manual effort that is prone to errors. While many off-the-shelf tools handle Scope 1 and 2 reasonably well, they fall short on Scope 3, typically relying on crude spend-based estimates rather than granular, activity-based data.
Yet Scope 3 is by far the largest component of most companies’
166 July 2025