ESG Risks And Opportunities: How Tech Can Help Companies Harness Data And Reimagine Their Business
- Media Manager
- Sep 21, 2023
- 2 min read
Forbes
Written By: Yvette Schmitter and Sammy Lakshmanan
Published: September 22nd, 2023
The digital age has ushered in a transformative shift in the way companies ingest, store and analyze data. This has led to an extraordinary proliferation of data across all operational facets.
This abundance of data has paradoxically given rise to a pressing issue — data fragmentation within organizations. Valuable data resides in silos across business functions and systems, making it a challenge to synthesize and transform into actionable insights. This disjointed data landscape poses a variety of business challenges, but it is especially problematic for organizations that aim to optimize business outcomes and align their operations with environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments.
The urgency of climate action
There’s no time to waste. The risks associated with climate change, ecosystem degradation, and resource scarcity are becoming more real every day, with 18 separate weather and climate disasters in 2022, each of which cost $1 billion in damage. At the same time regulators, investors and other stakeholders are putting pressure on companies to disclose how these issues impact the business.
Corporate ESG initiatives typically cut across multiple functions and platforms that don’t necessarily work together or make it easy to get an integrated picture of all the relevant data. In PwC’s 2022 Digital Trust Insights survey, 77% of respondents said their data infrastructure has “unnecessary and avoidable” complexity.
But in our most recent Pulse survey fielded in August, more executives said they plan to embed new technologies into their business model than any other strategic priority over the next three to five years. Specifically, 59% of all US business leaders plan to invest in new technologies such as cloud or artificial intelligence (AI) in the next 12 to 18 months. At the same time, half of all leaders surveyed said climate change poses a serious or moderate risk to their company.
