An online platform designed for companies to measure ESG activities
In order to promote the flow of money toward sustainable activities throughout the European Union, the European Commission adopted the Sustainable Finance Project. Among the measures proposed within the project is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). It will affect some 50,000 companies across Europe, including a thousand Czech ones. For small and medium-sized companies, the obligation to report green data will be postponed by three years. Starting next year, some Czech companies will therefore have to collect and evaluate non-financial information according to the CSRD project. This information will be ESG-related data, i.e. concerning sustainability, ecology and corporate and social responsibility. Once this information has been obtained, it will then have to be included in the annual reports issued for 2024. In this regard, CRIF (Czech Credit Bureau) has already developed the Synesgy tool.
Synesgy is a free online platform, which, through a questionnaire, will help companies measure their ESG activities, thus helping them to assess their social and environmental responsibility. The questionnaire is a standardized system of questions and answers based on the themes defined by the United Nations in its 17 Sustainable development goals through the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the most widely used global standard for non-financial reporting. The Synesgy platform questionnaires are divided into five basic sections, which include data on business, environment, corporate social responsibility and corporate governance. Specifically, it covers areas such as risk management, effects of climate change, water and waste management, gender pay gap, governance structure, etc. In addition to the five sections, Synesgy covers 15 so-called macro sectors, which will address specific problems in specific sectors, from agriculture to mining, from telecommunications to energy and heating. Once the questionnaire is completed, the result will be a certificate that is valid for 12 months, showing the company’s ‘green’ on an A-E scale in 5 categories: environmental, social, governance, sector and overall. The certificate can then be downloaded and placed on the company’s website and eventually shared.
“With the Synesgy platform, we want to help companies easily test the impact of their business on the green future of our planet…We see this global initiative by CRIF as an expression of support for sustainable development and the company’s transformation process towards a zero-emission economy, enabling companies to standardize ESG reporting across all corporate environments,” highlighted Petr Kučera, Executive Director of CRIF.
Sources: https://www.camic.cz/; https://www.crif.cz/; https://plana.earth/academy/
Sources of images: https://www.synesgy.com/; https://storyset.com/
