Half-Way There

It's been one and a half months into the project. Our team was diving into a pool of legislation across the United States and scrapping on a request for information from investors to scan appetites for something that was new to us. Wait, so how did we get into this? Let me remind you again that me and my teamwork for a non-profit organization in the US to assess their biodiversity standards and find their overlaps and gaps with the regulation and appetite of investors. Okay, continuing the first sentence, we were searching for biodiversity-related clauses on the federal and state levels, and it was overwhelming as there was so much to investigate. 

What we came up with is a template of a database in table form that includes the necessary information, such as the state, statute name, organization that implements it, disclosure requirement, and it’s overlap to make it easier for us to make a judgement on what to fill in about the information. But even with that, there are still a lot of bills to process. Thankfully, in the initial meeting, we already focused our scope on several states, and we (both the client and the team) have a very significant impact on biodiversity as well as on the federal level. From this lesson, we learned that it is important to set up the boundaries in the beginning so that you will have a narrower lens for the research. Another approach that we have taken is to come up with some terms and keywords from the company standards disclosure and use that as the basis for our search, so it would mean more in the context of the assessment. One challenge with this approach is that not all legislation has “exact” keywords, such as maybe using a synonym or other word that refers to it, but they put that in a complex sentence as it is a formal regulation. Given the situation, we are the ones that need to adapt and read the clause manually. 

On the other side, from the investor database creation, we were asked to do a scan on companies and organizations requests for information submission for standardized sustainability bodies. We came up with the same approach, which is the creation of a form template to fill in. The challenge with this is that we need to scan hundreds of submissions and find the companies and organizations that are based on and have a significant impact in the U.S. only. Adding to the challenge is that not all companies and organizations used the form that the sustainability body gave, as they could also give their request or comment on a separate personal form in the form of a comment letter. All in all, it led us to do more work and analyze their intentions one by one. 

Given all the tasks and challenges, we managed to have our interim presentation presented to the client, and thankfully, they seem happy and have the same thoughts on the direction this project is headed. It is still a lot of work to be done, but we’ll continue facing the work head on.