Navigating ESG and Sustainability Reporting

Having been in the SIRI Practicum course for over half a semester, I can now reflect more deeply and meaningfully on my experience. This course has taught me a great deal, as my team and I have been forced to learn about sustainability reporting frameworks and study their implementation and usage in very detailed and specific ways. For context, our project has us looking into the applicability of current sustainability/impact reporting standards for “PSOs” (public sector agencies) and determine how they could be made better “fit-for-purpose”. I have long wanted to learn about ESG and sustainability reporting, so I’m glad this project was one of the options this semester. The project is a good combination of my professional interest in sustainability reporting and my early career background working for PSOs. 

My team is unique in that all of us have public-sector aligned backgrounds and/or interests, while the rest of the class is primarily interested in impact-investing, which exists mostly in the financial, corporate, and consulting realms. Throughout the semester, other teams have shared with us their work, and the scopes are very different from ours. The same goes with the orient of the class sessions and guest speakers. There are pros and cons to this; on the one hand, we are exposed to a wide range of concepts, but on the other, the class sessions are not particularly useful for us. I was particularly disappointed when the head of the North America division of our client cancelled his guest lecture due to an illness, though I understand the reason was well beyond anyone’s control. I was looking forward to hearing him speak and connecting with him as that experience would’ve likely been more relevant and useful for our project than any other we’ve had through the class. 

With all that said, I understand that the purpose of the projects are more of an exploratory exercise, one that forces us to delve into deep research and learn about a topic that we may have previously not known. In that way, I’m sure it closely mirrors a professional consulting project and I’m appreciative to have that experience in an academic setting where I’m able to take risks and fail with fewer consequences. One such experience that I particularly enjoyed were the interim presentations, where all teams presented an overview of their projects, progress, learnings, and challenges to the entire class. This was a dynamic and exciting experience, and I greatly enjoyed and was proud to share about our project, since it is something we’ve developed from the group up. 

Though the learning curve has been relatively steep for me and my team, I appreciate that we have developed great group synergy and are all committed to the success of the project. Early on, we misunderstood an assignment that had us write a refined scope for the project, and that set us back significantly, as we had to meet with our client over the course of the next few weeks and continually revise our scope. Moreover, selecting our case studies has been more challenging than any of us imagined since there are a myriad of considerations to make and that is the most foundational part of the entire project. 

Despite this, we’ve taken initiative throughout the first half of the semester to conduct additional research and go beyond the client’s expectations for the final deliverables, including by conducting a landscape analysis of the current usage of their reporting standards by PSOs by creating an index with various criteria and assessing each reporting agency against each criterion. Though we as a team have some catch-up to do, I believe we are in a good position to exceed the client’s expectations and produce a quality report for them to critically assess their next steps in addressing low PSO reporting.