ESG | Daniel Antal

Dataweek²⁴: Data-driven Compliance with the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 16:22:00 +0100

This is a lightly edited version of the presentation at the Data-driven and Automated Compliance section of Dataweek²⁴ Event page.

It has often been said that ESG reporting is a data problem. If you want to fulfil the new requirements set by the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive, which is a legal act that changes European laws on financial accounting and its audit or assurance, you will encounter a very serious data linking and integration problem. If you have such sustainability bookkeeping, you must be able to factually link your financial accounts to your environmental and social accounts. In simple terms, if you expense the cost of 1 MW of electricity, then you cannot calculate the footprint of 0.98 MW in your sustainability report.

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ESG introduces two related challenges, which are best addressed by explicit knowledge bases, enterprise graphs connected to open knowledge graphs, and data sharing spaces.

The company must be able to collect data and report on other companies and things that happen outside of the boundaries of the company or company group. Such a practice had been in place in some heavily regulated industries; for example, the food industry had to bear a qualified responsibility over the entire food supply chain or the nuclear industry for the lifecycle of the fossile fuels.
The company must also be able to curate trustworthy data about entirely new domains: data about the natural or ecological environment, such as data on biodiversity, recycling, water; and data about the social environment, for example, indicators about affected communities, workers in the supply chain or end users.

Joining a data sharing space is a good solution because the new data requirements are not one-time data upgrades but require a permanent data connection with the ecological and social environment. A company and its ERP system or its key performance management users cannot import new data, such as metadata of the EU Taxonomy regulation, and call it a day. Data curation must be an ongoing activity.

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Most companies import relatively little data regularly, and therefore, they have little experience in data curation, i.e., the art of organising, annotating, and integrating data collected from various sources in a way that is presentable in the form of indicators or can be reused later. Perhaps their bookkeeping needs to import foreign exchange rates regularly if they export or import in their activities. Data curation will become an ongoing activity if they start to monitor and measure the environmental and social environment impacts of their actions.

So, if we agree that joining a data sharing space, i.e., an organisation that has pre-agreed terms and conditions on sharing and exchanging data, with pre-agreed terminology or vocabulary (“semantics”) and technology, the question is, what kind of data sharing organisation is the most appropriate?

The CSRD Directive has industry-agnostic elements, which must be fulfilled in every company, and industry-specific elements, which are being developed as we speak. For example, we work mainly with music and film production, both of which belong to the Media and Entertainment Group, which must apply the same industry-specific variations of the European Sustainability Development Standards. We think that the best is to create industry-specific data sharing spaces, such as the famous Data 4.0 for manufacturing, but allow them to be federated and to exploit further synergies: there are plenty of financial, economic, social or environmental data that are used by other existing data sharing spaces and it is not necessary to curate and produce them in, for example, a music or film-production oriented data sharing space.

Are for-profit and social enterprises technically ready to join data-sharing spaces? Not without help. While some large corporations have explicit knowledge bases and enterprise graphs, most smaller European enterprises do not necessarily have a distinct IT function. It is a simple relational database with a fixed schema if they manage databases. Bringing them on board requires simple systems and assistance.

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Reprex is building a data sharing system, Reprexbase, which is built around Wikibase as a knowledge broker system. Wikibase is the open-source software that hosts Wikidata, the largest open knowledge graph in the world. We extend it with various ETL modules and an ecosystem of peer-reviewed statistical libraries to create scientifically correct impact indicators and benchmarks. These extensions are necessary not only because most enterprises are not familiar with working with linked data or graphs but also because Companies are usually familiar with creating financial indicators (for SMEs, simple accounting indicators, larger enterprises with a controlling function, and more complex indicators) but not with the creation of non-financial statistical indicators. The CSRD directive calls for reporting more than 200 indicators over five environmental and four social matter groups, which is more than a company would have on a balanced scorecard. Reliably producing so many indicators is no small feat.

Large and public companies are directly responsible for CSRD reporting, i.e., integrating financial, environmental and social accounting. They need to improve their bookkeeping or ERP systems because often they do not even organise into a database much of the contents of the current invoices (physical quantities, units), which would allow them to create the factual basis between energy cost, energy use and energy footprint, for example. However, they must ask their suppliers for further environmental and social data. Without readily applicable Digital Product Passports, this is a considerable cost, estimated at around 1500 euros per supplier. If you are a festival organiser or a film producer with hundreds of suppliers, this will quickly pay for a simple data sharing space; if you do it with a cluster in your industry, the costs can be significantly reduced.

Data Sharing Spaces for CSRD

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0100

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ESRS in the Film, Television & Music Industry

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 15:00:00 +0100

Save the date.

Stadslandbouw Den Haag

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 16:30:00 +0100

Ru Wikmann, the co-founder of BeeSage and our Reprex’s partner in piloting the Global Pollinators Observatory and looking for partners for our idea about building a knowledge system that employs millions of bees into monitoring the ecosystem and the downstream of many food value chains.

We would like to find partners for the Dependence of society and the economy on pollinators HORIZON-CL6-2024-BIODIV-01-3 call. For beekeeper and environmental organisations: concept note and for university research partners: CfR.

The film Together We Grow was supplied by The Hague residents and entrepreneurs platform Ons Eten in collaboration with the Food.Film.Fest. of Voedsel Anders. Urban Agriculture The Hague (Stadslandbouw Den Haag) and Ons Eten are both committed to raising awareness about our food system; what do we eat, how good is it for us, where does it come from, does the producer get a fair price, what is needed for production, what is the impact on nature, etc. The films of this festival make you think about these topics and show opportunities.

Let’s get in touch if you are interested.

Open Productins: Integrating Financial and ESG Reporting for Film

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0100

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Open Productins: Integrating Financial and ESG Reporting for Film

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0100

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ImpactFest Roundabout: ESRS Reporting Standards

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 19:48:00 +0100

Daniel Antal, the co-founder of Reprex, moderated a roundabout with experts on the 8th ImpactFest about the problems around the introduction of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).

What is ImpactFest?

ImpactFest is the leading impact event. The eighth edition of ImpactFest took place in the Fokker Terminal in The Hague.

ESRS

The European Union’s revolutionary new integrated financial and sustainability reporting system will be introduced for about 4100 companies in the Netherlands and about 50,000 companies in the entire EU in 2024/25. Companies will have to connect the environmental and social impact measures of their economic activities with their financial accounting system and with the data system of their suppliers and buyers. In effect, they must be able to report on the whole lifecycle of a product or service.

Daniel Antal started with their own subjective mindmap of the introduction of ESRS, aligning some positive thoughts on the left-hand side and sceptical ones on the right-hand side.

Our Roundabout

Not revealing this mindmap above, the expert participants in the Roundabout engaged in a structured conversation, bringing questions and thoughts from their practice in sustainability consulting (with a social sustainability focus), university research (with a carbon focus) and application development for reporting.

Mindmapping our understanding of the opportunities and problems with the introduction of ESRS from next year.

The shared view on the introduction of ESRS and, generally, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) was that even though just in the Netherlands more than 4000 companies are expected to apply these standards directly from the 2024 business year, and tens of thousands of SMEs in the supply chain will need to supply structured data, there is a very low level of understanding on the requirements. Companies hope that their accountant, auditor, or sustainability consultant will develop a magic tool that will be installed as a plug-in to their ERP system, and it will solve the problem.

Such a magic bullet that will hit all requirements with one shot, of course, does not exist. The aim of any ESG reporting is not to produce a report but to focus the management’s attention on reducing harmful impacts and increasing beneficial impacts on their stakeholders, users, and the broader environment they work in.

At the end of the conversation, we were making educated guesses about how various corporate leaders, including CFOs and heads of HR, will be involved in the process.

Reprex is developing an intelligent, semantic model to connect data in the financial bookkeeping of companies with reliable scientific benchmarks and data sources for benchmarking and target setting and with harmonised survey data for the supply chain data. Our OpenProduction tool prepares such data integration in film and music production. It utilises various OSSH (open source software and hardware) solutions to provide necessary upgrades for ERP systems or to support suppliers to produce information for their corporate buyers, donors for banks and insurance companies in a trustworthy and cost-effective way.

Based on the success of this Roundabout, we will organise short meetups where experts and practitioners can exchange professional views in an informal setting. We’ll set up such meetings in The Hague, Amsterdam and Brussels in the near future. Interested? Get in touch and we will send you a Doodle about possible dates.

Roundtable Discussions on Greening European Film Policy

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0200

Greening European Film Policy (GEFP) explores the burgeoning field of environmentally sustainable - ‘green’ - production in the European film industries. The project views green production as both an ethical proposition and a means to ensure the competitiveness of the European film industry - under which we include film, television, and streaming media. We position green production as a unique and as-yet unexplored competitive advantage for the film sector, where advanced development, embedding, and dissemination of green production practices is a crucial factor in maintaining the competitiveness, if not the very viability, of the European film industries.

GEFP focuses on mapping ongoing policy initiatives for green production and evaluate how the dynamics of top-down governance and horizontal policy and communication incentivise, deploy, and assess on-the-ground practice. We collaborate with key stakeholders across the UK and European green film and television sector, including policymakers, environmental consultants, production companies, and creatives to provide policy recommendations to incentivize a more sustainable sector.

Daniel Antal, CFA, was participating in the panel presentations and discussions on behalf of Reprex and presented the ideas behind the Eviota project.

The Budapest event was orgnanised by Dr Pietari Kääpä, University of Warwick, Policy Support Fund, Laurent, and GreenEyes Productions.

Questions for Film Funds and Policies

What are the current norms regarding funding and policy requirements around sustainability?
What challenges do you face in implementing or imposing sustainability policies?
Are there ways in which you might benefit from more communication or understanding of on-set experience from a sustainability POV?
Are there ways in which you might benefit from more regional or international collaboration, or is funding an inherently localized issue?
We mainly talked about sustainability from a production POV so far, where do you think featuring it as part of the storyline has relevance / potential? Is the film fund considering similar changes to what happened internationally (BFI, Eurimage etc.) where the funding applications require to elaborate on any planned sustainable practices?
What models do you think work well in other countries, that you think would be realistic to implement in the region and what is needed in order to implement it?

New trends in controlling: the strategic and digital challenge

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:30:00 +0100

The Eviota project aims to create sustainability reports connected to the financial accounts of companies, NGOs, and civil society actors. The first phase concentrates on greenhouse gases and air pollutants. We want to create reliable estimates of the carbon and other pollutants footprint of music-related (social) enterprises based on their spending (“connected financial and sustainability reporting”.)

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

16:30: Meet and greet
17:00: Short presentation
17:15: Discussion of your reporting

The discussion will be based on the accounting documents sent to us in advance. We will create a first version of a simplified sustainability report about your music or film company (for profit, or non-profit.) we will not share any financial information in the meetup, only visualizations of risk heatmaps, and common reporting and sustainability problems.

Why connect to your accounting software?

The accounting system already records all those economic events that may have an impact on how your company, directly or indirectly, causes greenhouse gas emissions, uses precious water, or may help to close (or, accidentally, widen) the gender pay gap.

As soon as the modification of the EU accounting directive take effect, you will have to connect your financial accounts to your sustainability reporting.

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We start from the annual summary of supplier and buyer ledgers, or the trial balance that has this information.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries. It is easy to reconcile with US GAAP based documents.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity.

This way your annual report will be consistent, if you say in the financial part that you spend 1000 euro on energy, then we will calculate the greenhouse gas emissions based on KWh volume of the the energy that cost you 1000 euros.

ESG | Daniel Antal

Dataweek²⁴: Data-driven Compliance with the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive

Data Sharing Spaces for CSRD

Slide Navigation (press F)

ESRS in the Film, Television & Music Industry

Stadslandbouw Den Haag

Open Productins: Integrating Financial and ESG Reporting for Film

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Questions?

Open Productins: Integrating Financial and ESG Reporting for Film

Slide Navigation (press F)

Questions?

ImpactFest Roundabout: ESRS Reporting Standards

What is ImpactFest?

ESRS

Our Roundabout

Roundtable Discussions on Greening European Film Policy

New trends in controlling: the strategic and digital challenge