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ESGgo at COP27- Interview with Orly Glick

Sustainable Innovation Forum Interview with ESGgo's CEO, Orly Glick

Many exciting things took place during  our time at the 2022 Climate Action Sustainable Innovation Forum, running alongside COP27.

During that week, ESGgo's CEO Orly Glick had the opportunity to share her thoughts on technology as an enabler- how fine tuning data can help global companies in their sustainability journey and the importance of accurate ESG reporting for reaching net zero.

Watch the full interview below-

ESGgo is the ONE-STOP-SHOP ESG technology tool for enterprises with internal ESG data monitoring, gap analysis and machine learning based optimization. Can you tell us more about how you help your global customers?

ESGgo is the sustainability software platform. And what we do is we have a software tool that we're using machine learning to help companies collect, organize, and optimize their ESG and sustainability data. And we do this with different tools. We have a data collection tool, where we collect the ESG and sustainability data from across the organization from different departments. We have a collaboration tool and a workflow management tool, where companies and their different departments can work with the different work streams around the organization to share the workload. The data is also gathered into a benchmark tool, where you can benchmark your sustainability data versus peers and competitors. We have a gap analysis tool and we also have a suppliers tool. And all of that is to help companies optimize their ESG posture and their sustainability score.

As more and more companies gravitate toward emphasizing ESG data to consumers and investors, how important is accurate ESG reporting in accelerating the transition to net zero?

This is a great question and I think that everything starts with accountability. And when you think about accountability, you think about measurements, right? So if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. That's a saying by Lord Kelvin, who invented the measurement system of temperatures, absolute temperatures. So if we're thinking about measurement, measurement can help organizations with improving and putting real KPIs on sustainability, and that's probably the only way that we could achieve net zero.

Now, when companies assign KPIs and measure against these KPIs, investors can also look at these KPIs and these measurements and understand how companies are doing. And if we're thinking about measurements, there is a little bit of an issue with sustainability data, and I call it the Data Spaghetti. There's many different frameworks, there's many different reporting agency questionnaires. The data is all around the organization. There's different measurements, different units, different formulas.

If you're a company and you have different business units in different countries in the world, there's different metrics. And so this is creating the Data Spaghetti. So the real issue here is how to collect the data, standardize and normalize it in the right way, to allow companies to do the proper measurements against benchmarks, and to allow investors to look at these measurements. And I was an investor before in public companies and in private companies, and I know that this is critical for investors and critical for the success of companies and of our world to get to net zero.

Why are events such as the Sustainable Innovation Forum important in turning ambition into action?

This is really an amazing ecosystem. And you need an ecosystem, a whole ecosystem for this to succeed. You need the regulators, you need the investors, you need cities, you need corporates, and you need the consumers to do it all together. And so that's a big effort. And so the sustainable innovation, sustainable forum helps get everybody together and allow technology to be a part of it. Technology is an enabler, and if the biggest issue here to take it to the next step is data and measurement, technology now will come in and help measure, organize and become more accountable. And so this will push and help get to net zero faster.