Business View Magazine l October 2022

13 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 10 Co-Authors: John Bottega, President, EDM Council and David Wray, President, DFCG International Group A s W. Edwards Deming once famously said: “In God We Trust, All Others Must Bring Data.” Never have these words been more relevant and truer than now! Climate scientists seek specific quality data for their models and projections for land and space climate analysis. Policymakers require data to measure the economic impact of climate change and establish policies to manage it. Banks use climate data to inform portfolio investment and lending decisions, and performance monitoring. Companies need data to manage their value chain impacts and climate risks. Finally, customers depend on climate data to inform their purchasing decisions. Each actor uses climate data to inform decision-making and hold others to account. Data is, of course, created within an ecosystem of actors, not in siloed isolation. It becomes important for each stakeholder within the information chain to understand how the external environment interacts with their business, and then transmit that information along a value chain to the next participant in it (see figure 1). Data, Digitalization, the DSD-Lab An Innovative Way Forward for ESG Why is this context important? It simply helps us understand more clearly the ESG ecosystem problem. There are four fundamental data related issues within the ecosystem: 1. A lack of clarity: Actors in the value chain don’t know what information is needed by others, or even themselves at times, which explains… 2. A lack of data management robustness: Companies, in particular, have not invested in ESG data governance the way they have in financial data governance leading to immature risk and opportunity management practices, made more complex by… 3. A lack of accessible and discoverable data: Information is trapped in siloed systems,