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Industry insight

This October, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) makes the state's climate disclosure laws' draft reporting rules available for public comment. While these reporting rules will soon appear in Sustainability Explorer, you can get started now to prepare for the legislation.

• The Climate-Related Financial Risk Act (Senate Bill (SB) 261) requires companies with at least $500M in annual revenue doing business in California to publicly disclose their climate-related risks and mitigation strategy every two years, starting January 1, 2026. 
  
  To reduce the burden this first year, CARB indicates minimum reporting requirements will be acceptable. For 2026, no emissions disclosures or scenario analysis are required, and companies can use reasonably-available data, representing either 2023/2024 or 2024/2025 activity. These allowances apply only to 2026 reporting; future years will have more robust requirements.

  To identify climate-related risks in compliance with SB 261, you can use either the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) or International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) S2: Climate-related Disclosures — both of which are available in Sustainability Explorer.

• The Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act (SB 253) requires companies with at least $1B in annual revenue doing business in California to report their Scope 1 and 2 emissions and obtain limited assurance by a proposed deadline of June 30, 2026 for fiscal year 2025; Scope 3 emissions will follow in 2027 for FY2026. 
  
  While CARB's draft templates for Scope 1 and 2 reporting are currently pending public opinion, your company can begin to calculate emissions inventories in Carbon and collect related values in Sustainability Program now to accommodate the required assurance timelines.

Curious about California Climate in Sustainability Explorer? Check out the upcoming Sustainability Management roadmap webinar!

Looking for more insight? Workiva has Industry Principals dedicated to gathering and sharing Sustainability & Carbon knowledge and expertise! For more insight, follow them — Alyssa Zucker for Carbon, Esther Toth for EMEA & APAC, and Mark Mellen for North America & APAC — on LinkedIn.

What's new

To add multiple items to Sustainability Program in bulk, Program Owners and Editors can now select Import from the Program overview menu. 

From here, you can generate Spreadsheet templates that include the sheets and columns needed to import new:

• Custom tags or dimensions
• Topics
• Metrics
• Metric tags, dimensions, or related Explorer content

Looking to import something else? To add metric values or tasks in bulk, contact your Workiva Customer Success Manager or implementation partner for assistance.

After you complete the Spreadsheet templates, select Import again to add their items, such as to set up a new Program or build on an existing Program. To help ensure everything imports successfully, the Program validates the templates to identify any errors to resolve — such as duplicate items — before it adds them. If a row has an error, you can fix the issue or remove it from the import altogether. 

The Program imports only rows with a status of Ready, so you can import them at any time — even as you continue to resolve other rows' errors. Depending the number of sheets and rows, the import may take some time. Feel free to work on other things, just keep the import's tab open in your workspace.

Import adds new items to a Program. To update existing items, use Find and replace instead.

To learn more, view Import into Sustainability Program in Support Center.

Want to stay current? Follow What's new in Sustainability Reporting!

On the calendar

October 15, join Workiva for Sustainability Management Product Roadmap and Innovations, a review of recently-released features and a preview of upcoming releases for the Sustainability Reporting and Carbon solutions, including:

• Intelligent Sustainability with Workiva AI
• CDP questionnaire submissions
• Decarbonization initiatives
• Data management enhancements
• Automation improvements

Register today!

Share your thoughts

The Workiva Community provides ample opportunity to engage with and learn from subject-matter experts, advisory partners, and other sustainability reporters. Join the conversation in these discussion threads:

• Community Connect: Sustainability, to learn from industry professionals and peers as you collaborate and share insights, challenges, and solutions.
• Sustainability Management, to discuss best practices and experiences with sustainability reporting, in general and within the Workiva Platform
• What's new in Sustainability, to learn the latest enhancements of Sustainability Reporting features like Sustainability Program and Sustainability Explorer
• Sustainability Feedback, to share and support ideas on how to improve Sustainability Management features

Questions?

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