“Sustainability is clearly and irreversibly moving from a ‘Good to Do’ to a ‘Must to Do’ phase. The downside risks associated with climate urgency, increasing stakeholder demand, and regulatory pressure are here and now. On the other hand, sustainability and transition-lead business opportunities are multi-trillion dollar horizons. No enterprise can succeed and thrive in the 21st century without embracing ESG as part of its core strategy,” highlights Jangoo Dalal, Co-Founder & CEO, GovEVA, through this interview…
What exactly are sustainable business practices?
At its most basic level, sustainability in business is about the impact your company has on the environment and society. It’s about making sure that as your business grows—whether that’s through increasing revenue, gaining market share, or innovating products— you’re also doing your part to address some of the world’s biggest challenges. These include climate change, income inequality, resource depletion, and human rights issues, to name a few.
But here’s the kicker: sustainability isn’t just about doing good for the sake of it. It’s about making sure your business does well financially, too. This idea of balancing profit with purpose is sometimes called the ‘Double Bottom Line’ where companies aim to do well financially while also doing good for society and the environment. Companies that manage to crack this code—doing well financially while doing good socially and environmentally—are often the ones that thrive the most. By integrating green HRM practices, businesses can achieve sustainable development, ensuring alignment with cultural, ecological, and economic sustainability goals while gaining a competitive advantage.
GovEVA is revolutionizing ESG management with its AI-powered platform, helping businesses streamline their sustainability efforts. While 51% of India’s top companies disclose Scope 3 emissions, only 27% are fully prepared to meet ESG requirements. GovEVA steps in by offering a comprehensive suite of solutions, from GHG accounting to net-zero strategies, ensuring global standards alignment. With impressive achievements like calculating 107 Mn tCO2e in emissions, covering 1.74 Mn+ employees under DEI metrics, and tracking 865 Mn litres of water usage, GovEVA is transforming how businesses achieve sustainability.
Environmental concerns have now become non-negotiable. Incorporating ESG strategies not only makes you responsible and accountable for your actions but also increases your brand value and customer loyalty. Through the example of big corporations, we understood which strategies were used to retain customer loyalty and give them a competitive edge. By incorporating these policies, you can make a positive impact on society. We assist companies with incorporating ESG reporting and strategies for your business. We provide you with services such as automated report generation per Global standard frameworks, real-time action & progress monitoring and much more. Talking specifically about Scope 3, it is someone else’s Scope 1 & 2 emission targets. As long as you as an organization have imbibed Sustainability in your ethos and got your Scope 1 & 2 fundamentals right, getting Scope 3 becomes a logical extension of the value chain as long as you treat them as true value partners.
According to you, what challenges are companies facing in shifting gears to more sustainable alternatives?
In terms of moving from intent to action in embracing sustainable alternatives, the biggest challenges that companies face are:
- There is a lack of internal capacity and know-how among the current teams. As this is a relatively new area, enterprises are gradually building up capacity in it.
- Data: To make decisions about sustainable options, companies must inevitably weigh their investments against their returns. The starting point for this is reliable, measurable, and auditable data.
How can companies assess suppliers using various ESG parameters? How can technology adoption drive significant change in this regard?
Companies and regulators increasingly realize that for their ESG initiatives to succeed, they must expand their boundaries outside the organization to their upstream and downstream value chains. The starting point of this is to start rating and benchmarking your superiors on rigorous and standards-based ESG parameters. These must be specific to your business, and your supplier’s industry, size, and overall maturity must be kept in mind. This would inevitably present multiple challenges. Technology can help overcome these by providing intelligent AI-driven algorithms which provide customized vendor-specific assessments. On the execution side, technology can help overcome the inevitable challenges of educating the value chain at scale and ensuring seamless digital workflows for digital collaboration across organizational boundaries.
Are there any data collection and reporting challenges that companies are facing? How can they circumvent them?
The number one challenge that organizations face in embracing ESG holistically and strategically with proper regulatory reporting is Data. ESG data lies across multiple functional silos in an organization. Further, it is available in a row, in a directly unusable format. This is compounded by a lack of in-house expertise on formats, global standards and regulatory requirements to transpose these information sets into meaningful ESG data. Specialized organizations like GovEVA offer clients a potent combination of digital ESG Platform plus associated advisory services to help organizations start & accelerate their sustainability journeys.
What crucial role does new age technology tools such as AI and machine learning play in creating sustainable supply chains?
For an organization to excel and reap the full benefits of its sustainability initiatives, expanding its ESG boundaries becomes critical. Once you step outside your enterprise boundaries, your challenges around data sets, peer-benchmarking, analyzing, and making meaningful conclusions from multiple data pools become pretty time-consuming. This is where AI and ML can be of great help, specifically in the areas of CO2 tracking and management, waste and water management, optimization and AI-enabled supply chain transparency.
How do you foresee the sustainability landscape moving from here on?
Sustainability is clearly and irreversibly moving from a ‘Good to Do’ to a ‘Must to Do’ phase. The downside risks associated with climate urgency, increasing stakeholder demand, and regulatory pressure are here and now. On the other hand, sustainability and transition-lead business opportunities are multi-trillion dollar horizons. No enterprise can succeed and thrive in the 21st Century without embracing ESG as part of its core strategy.
Share with us the step-by-step approach that will help companies take the first step in driving the change.
For those companies that are just starting on their ESG journeys, the whole agglomerated process can be pretty daunting; the best is to break this down into proven stages, which, when executed in a structured manner, can lead to an accelerated journey with definite outcomes. The first step would be to conduct a Materiality Assessment and map your organizations’ specific priorities and focus area. The next logical step is to conduct a standards-based and industry-specific Baseline Assessment; this will help you figure out where your current level of processes and practices stand vis-à-vis the ideal benchmark from an ESG point of view. Parallelly, an organization should start collating, calculating and managing all its key ESG Metrics, like Energy & Emission, waste, water, and critical social & governance indicators. Once we have these three pillars in place, it is the right time to chart your ESG roadmap: the requirement of periodic Regulatory Reporting, which is inevitable, would then become another milestone in your journey rather than the main focus.
Can you share with us 5P solution to accelerate ESG PACE?
The 5P solution is the one that accelerates your ESG PACE (Productivity, Accuracy, Collaboration, Efficiency)
- Purpose built Digital ESG solution: The GovEVA Digital ESG solution, powered by our cutting-edge AI functionality, has been designed to address the continuously evolving ESG challenges faced by organizations of all sizes. It features in-built flexibility, scalability, and agility that help you achieve your ESG goals.
- Potent combination of Technology and Domain expertise: The GovEVA Digital ESG platform, combined with domain expertise provided by ESG-certified professionals, offers a comprehensive solution that facilitates real-time data collation, multiple stakeholder collaboration, high levels of efficiency, and 100% accuracy. It also provides clarity on materiality, baseline assessment, goal setting, gap analysis, roadmap strategy, and guidance on reporting frameworks.
- Proven and Assured: Our Digital ESG platform has been thoroughly tested by clients across industries and is very robust, setting the highest performance benchmarks. High-precision GHG calculators, AI-enabled multi-framework reporting, and digital supply chain assessments ensure end-to-end sustainability management and enable businesses to seamlessly track, monitor, and report dispersed ESG data points in alignment with Global Sustainability Standards. GovEVA is your trusted partner that delivers services that are in line with the aspirations of today’s responsible businesses.
- Pedigree: As forerunners in the ESG sector, we are not just a forward-thinking SaaS-based tech company – we are architects of change, co-founded by Global Thought Leaders shaping the future of responsible business. GovEVA is led by seasoned industry champions who practice the highest levels of excellence and governance. They play a crucial role in empowering organizations in their sustainability journey, continuously guiding being a step ahead in a constantly changing and dynamic ESG landscape.
- Partnering for Success: Over the past four years, we have become a trusted partner to many organizations. We have successfully fulfilled their unique requirements and helped them achieve their ESG goals. We combine customer feedback with changing regulatory guidelines and use the latest technologies to continuously deliver superior services that provide 100% satisfaction to all our customers.
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