Nordic authorities team up to make sustainability reporting simpler

New three-year programme on automisation and standardisation involves agencies from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. 

Authorities from Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland are collaborating to simplify corporate sustainability reporting.  

The Danish Business Authority announced the new three-year programme, known as the Nordic Automatic Sustainability Reporting initiative, on Tuesday. 

It is funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers, an intergovernmental body that seeks to solve the region’s shared challenges.

Members include Finland’s State Treasury, the Norwegian Agency for Public and Financial Management, and Iceland’s revenue and customs agency. 

Focusing on automatisation and standardisation, the group will test and develop existing digital systems with a view to using them across borders to simplify manual, time-consuming elements of sustainability reporting. 

“Data is collected from suppliers in various formats – via emails, Excel sheets and PDF files – and then has to be processed and collated,” observed the Danish Business Authority. 

“This takes time and makes it difficult to ensure consistent and comparable data quality.”  

Sustainability experts in Denmark are also in the process of setting up an ‘ESG Forum’ to coordinate companies within the country, and eventually throughout Europe, on policy issues.