Next steps in Suominen’s sustainability reporting
With the ever-growing importance of sustainability and it being at the center of the strategy of many companies, there is a need for increasing sustainability reporting to track progress and to communicate transparently about sustainability strategies.
Sustainability reporting in a nutshell is a process by which organizations disclose their non-financial performance, focusing on their environmental, social, and economic impacts. It is a tool for communicating about Suominen’s sustainability strategy and how we conduct business in a responsible way as well to track progress and drive development. Nowadays sustainability report is a self-evident requirement for a large company to transparently communicate about sustainability performance to external stakeholders including our customers, investors and financers.
At Suominen, we have been reporting on sustainability for over 10 years. The most important developments in the past years have been reporting according to the Global Initiative Guidelines (GRI) and the third-party assurance of sustainability data. The GRI provides guidelines on what to report and how to ensure that companies follow the same principles. This enables that reports can be compared, just like with financial reporting. Third-party assurance then ensures that all the data is correct and accurate similarly like with financial reporting.
The next years will also bring many changes to sustainability reporting. Structured sustainability reporting according to the GRI that is audited has been mostly voluntary. However, the EU has recently introduced regulation that will make sustainability reporting and auditing mandatory for large companies like Suominen. Starting in 2025, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will require companies to report on sustainability even more extensively than the GRI. The failure to do so will lead to similar sanctions as the failure to report financial information.
Another regulation that can already be found from Suominen’s annual report is the EU Sustainable Finance Taxonomy, in which we are required to report how much of our turnover, investment and costs are sustainable according to the criteria set by the EU.
While the amount of regulation coming may seem overwhelming, Suominen sees that these changes are an opportunity to develop our sustainability leadership further. Suominen aims to continue being the frontrunner in sustainability and keeping up with reporting regulations is a part of our transparent sustainability journey.
Familiarize yourself more our current sustainability report in our Annual Report.