Streamline your ESG Reporting with AWS Sustainability Data Fabric and Accenture

As global regulations for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting continue to grow, corporations are facing increased pressure to organize and disclose their sustainability performance. However, many companies are struggling to effectively manage their ESG data, which puts meeting these disclosure requirements at risk.

Demand for transparent and accurate ESG reporting is being driven by stakeholders, investors, and consumers to enhance trust, reputation, and drive long-term sustainable growth and resilience. At the same time, corporations are looking to meet these expectations as efficiently, transparently, and comprehensively as possible, while providing useful insights to internal decision-makers to meet their sustainability targets.

According to a recent Accenture study, only 10 percent of CFOs report that their companies are prepared for detailed reporting mandates. Additionally, 75 percent of companies lack reliable ESG data, with 70 percent still relying on manual processes for ESG reporting. Inconsistent data combined with error-prone processes erodes trust and prevents organizations from focusing on differentiating workloads.

AWS Sustainability Data Fabric speeds efforts to hit ESG insights

To address these challenges, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed the Sustainability Data Fabric (SDF) — a purpose-built, flexible, and extensible framework that enables faster and more accurate sustainability insights. SDF provides foundational data management functions on AWS using an open, scalable, and modular architecture that provides seamless integration with in-house and partner solutions.

The SDF solution accelerator addresses key pain points in ESG data management, including the need to extract data from various sources in different formats, centralize and unify sustainability data, and ensure accuracy and auditability through transparent lineage.

Decentralizing data ownership to individual domains or business units while maximizing cross- enterprise access to ESG data fosters collaboration and is more scalable. This is especially useful when collecting and validating data for a large number of KPIs with future use-case crossover. SDF facilitates such an organizational data strategy.

Building an ESG data digital backbone powered by SDF drives strategic advantage as companies can quickly target areas of differentiation and move away from manual processes. Organizations that establish a solid foundation for managing ESG data can be better positioned to drive sustainable growth, enhance stakeholder engagement, mitigate risks, and capitalize on emerging opportunities in the global marketplace. Furthermore, companies can unleash the true power of generative AI (gen AI) by having a large corpus of high-quality ESG data available for gen AI agents or chatbots to analyze.

Accenture provides ESG data excellence with rapid implementation of SDF

Accenture, a strategic partner of AWS, is helping customers rapidly implement the SDF solution into their environments, using pre-built data model accelerators to seamlessly access and integrate ESG data into a variety of sustainability use cases. Accenture has developed domain-specific data ingestion templates and industry-specific AI-powered benchmarking and report-generation tools for business owners to understand and automate reporting on their ESG performance.

Accenture brings a collection of sustainability assets built with AWS services that can also be integrated into a sustainability data fabric for industry-specific use cases. For example, a well-governed data foundation with industry-specific KPI frameworks is integral in achieving goals pertaining to circular economy (read more about Accenture’s Circular Intelligence platform). Certifying nature-based solutions like reforestation can prove challenging, therefore building a value chain traceability solution with multi-party data tracing back to a tree’s seed origin can accelerate biodiversity solutions (read more about Accenture’s Squirrel seed marketplace). Simplifying the governance of water usage data can illuminate water management inefficiencies that exist across operations and ultimately allow for water footprint reduction (read more about Accenture’s Water Management platform).

Learn more about the Accenture AWS partnership to accelerate your ESG digital backbone development. Visit the AWS Solutions Library for a more comprehensive list of use cases that SDF enables.