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Given the ever-changing landscape of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and sustainability reporting, adopting a new framework or standard — or even a new version of one — can be a daunting but inevitable task. To help ease this transition, you can create Readiness Assessments from Sustainability Explorer. 

Note: Currently, Readiness Assessments support only the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). For a more detailed assessment of your impacts, risks, and opportunities (IROs) with the ESRS, you can work with an advisory partner to use a supplemental gap assessment template to help comply with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

Review content

When you create a Readiness Assessment, you can review the new framework content, just as you can elsewhere in Sustainability Explorer. Disclosure-by-disclosure, you can assess its requirements and determine the impact on your company. 

As you review the content, you can choose which topics or disclosures to include in the assessment, such as based on their materiality to your company and its stakeholders.

Assess gaps

For each disclosure you choose to include, you can decide whether you intend to report it for the selected reporting year — even if internally — or in a future report. 

Based on these reporting decisions, you can then:

• Identify gaps for disclosures you decide to report, based on:
  • Relevant data available in Sustainability Program or elsewhere
  • Your confidence in the available data
• Document your reporting decisions — such to explain why you choose to omit a disclosure or only report it internally — with a relevant point of contact or supporting documentation.
• Apply custom assessment tags — created by your Workspace Owner — to categorize content or decisions based on data visibility, strategic gaps, or other contexts.

To learn more, view Manage reporting decisions in Readiness Assessment.

Take action

To help resolve gaps identified in your data collection, you can then create an action plan for each disclosure.

From an action plan, you can:

• Create tasks for yourself — like a To-Do list — or delegate tasks to workspace members for a collaborative effort.
• Automatically createProgram metrics to enable data collection for an overall disclosure or its specific requirements.

To learn more, view Resolve gaps for Readiness Assessments.