ESG disclosure & reporting8 min read

ESG KPIs worth the configuration, and the ones that waste a quarter

An ESG metric survives contact with an audit for one reason: somebody outside the reporting team produced the document it came from. A gas invoice, a weighbridge ticket, a fuel card statement, a meter read. Everything else in the design of a KPI is secondary to that, including how well it maps to a framework.

The corollary is unpopular. A metric whose source is a spreadsheet the sustainability team maintains is not a measurement. It is an assertion with decimal places, and the more of them a report contains the less any of it is worth. That is a judgment rather than a rule, and it is the judgment the rest of this article runs on.

What a metric has to have before it earns a place

A KPI is worth configuring if it has an external source document, a named individual who owns the number, a denominator that moves only for reasons connected to the numerator, and an action somebody could take if it moved the wrong way. Metrics failing the last test are still worth collecting sometimes, for disclosure. They are not worth putting on a dashboard.