➡ The answer from a regulatory point of view is yes.
Digitalisation is one of EU’s top-3 political priorities, together with the European Green Deal and geopolitical resilience:
“Digitalisation facilitates supervision and enforcement, creates opportunities to collect and exploit information more efficiently, and holds the potential for significant cost savings for both sustainability report users and companies.
Digitalisation also enables the centralisation at Union and Member State level of data in an open and accessible format that facilitates reading and allows for the comparison of data.” (CSRD – EU directive 2022/2464 of 14 December 2022)
The CSRD report should also be verifiable and needs to be audited, and for that a digitized audit trail is strongly recommended:
“Sustainability information is verifiable if it is possible to corroborate the information itself or the inputs and methods of calculation used to derive it”, and “provide evidence that verify that it reflects the actual plans or decisions made by the undertaking” (ESRS).
➡ The answer from a logical point of view is also yes.
“The wheel was invented 5000 years ago, but it took until the 1970s before the suitcase got wheels. Why did we insist on carry when it’s so much easier to roll? … The wheel changed the world. It reduces friction and provides a leverage effect. Suddenly you can now move the previously immovable. And go where you want to go, faster and with less effort.” (Katrine Marçal, Mother of Invention, 2020)
To succeed, sustainability teams need modern tools. Today, no one would dream of letting the CFO manage financial statements alone with just an Excel spreadsheet. The same now applies to sustainability strategy and reporting.
Research also shows that companies who do not use system support for strategy implementation only have a 30% success rate, but also that the chances of strategic success triple with a digital solution. And failing sustainability strategy is no longer an option.
CSRD, sustainability standards and digitalisation are major opportunities to build awareness, resilience, efficiency and growth opportunities. Why wait? Unless – of course – you are happy carrying and wasting effort 🙂 .
The SaaS solution Cleerit helps you turn intangible ambition into tangible results, unlock the potential of your materiality assessments, create actionable roadmaps for strategic success, and automate sustainability data collection and reporting.