The digital age has ushered in a transformative shift in the way companies ingest, store and analyze data. This has led to an extraordinary proliferation of data across all operational facets.

This abundance of data has paradoxically given rise to a pressing issue — data fragmentation within organizations. Valuable data resides in silos across business functions and systems, making it a challenge to synthesize and transform into actionable insights. This disjointed data landscape poses a variety of business challenges, but it is especially problematic for organizations that aim to optimize business outcomes and align their operations with environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments.

Meanwhile, some companies have started gathering specific ESG data — particularly that related to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — in preparation for proposed regulations that seek broader climate and environmental sustainability disclosures, such as the forthcoming SEC scope 3 emissions disclosure and the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). But you shouldn’t view such requirements solely as a compliance exercise.

Leveraging technology to help you efficiently mine the information needed for current and future disclosures allows you to ground decision-making in real-time data. Other benefits include a more complete view of overall business operations and performance, as well as the ability to glean valuable insights about how to adjust corporate strategy to help drive long-term growth.

The urgency of climate action

There’s no time to waste. The risks associated with climate change, ecosystem degradation, and resource scarcity are becoming more real every day, with 18 separate weather and climate disasters in 2022, each of which cost $1 billion in damage. At the same time regulators, investors and other stakeholders are putting pressure on companies to disclose how these issues impact the business.

Corporate ESG initiatives typically cut across multiple functions and platforms that don’t necessarily work together or make it easy to get an integrated picture of all the relevant data. In PwC’s 2022 Digital Trust Insights survey, 77% of respondents said their data infrastructure has “unnecessary and avoidable” complexity.

But in our most recent Pulse survey fielded in August, more executives said they plan to embed new technologies into their business model than any other strategic priority over the next three to five years. Specifically, 59% of all US business leaders plan to invest in new technologies such as cloud or artificial intelligence (AI) in the next 12 to 18 months. At the same time, half of all leaders surveyed said climate change poses a serious or moderate risk to their company.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a broad and deep set of cloud-based capabilities in AI, machine learning (ML), Internet of Things (IoT) and data analytics that can help companies of sizes and across multiple sectors build and implement ESG solutions to automate decision-making, identify and create new business models, and unlock and amplify innovation to meet their sustainability goals.

Sustainability encompasses the capacity to create-long term value through comprehensive focus on ESG factors. But it takes coordinated effort and help from technology solutions that allow you to:

• Ingest varied facets of ESG data in real time, including GHG emissions, workforce composition, water and waste management data, safety incidences, cyber breaches and governance standards
• Secure data across your IT infrastructure
• Analyze the data to produce predictive analytics
• Execute on strategic initiatives that arise from the data analysis
• Communicate strategic insights and initiatives across the value chain and enable collaboration across multiple parties

3 reasons to reimagine your business with data and technology

Beyond compliance, there are powerful incentives for aligning data, technology and your company’s sustainability initiatives.Specifically, you can make advances the following three areas:

• Strategy: Amid ongoing uncertainty, companies need to be fit for growth. The right digital investments can help you reimagine your business models and strategies, optimize your value chains, create differentiated customer experiences and deliver sustainable transformation.
• Action: By tech-enabling a sustainability strategy and ESG reporting, you can more easily spot supply chain efficiencies and devise methods for reducing a product’s carbon footprint — or come up with more sustainable products and services that attract new customers.
• Visibility: Technology can help provide a clear picture of the enterprise in real time. The right data platform can afford you a more complete view of your operations by enabling analytics tools to take in a variety of data to provide useful insights and enable decisions that help you create change, drive value and monitor progress against climate goals.

PwC and AWS: a converging sustainability journey

Global regulations and key stakeholders are pushing companies to provide a holistic view of emissions generated across your value chain (Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions). PwC and AWS fully grasp the gravity of these requirements — and both companies are on a similar sustainability journey.

Amazon co-founded the Climate Pledge with Global Optimism in 2019, and as an Amazon company, AWS is committed to ongoing measurement and reporting of GHG emissions, decarbonization and achieving net zero by 2040.

PwC is working toward a 50% absolute reduction of scope 1 and 2 emissions, as well as a 50% reduction in scope 3 business travel (including land-based travel, air travel and accommodation) greenhouse gas emissions by fiscal year 2030.