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?

ESRS | Daniel Antal

ImpactFest Roundabout: ESRS Reporting Standards

What is ImpactFest?

ESRS

Our Roundabout

Roundtable Discussions on Greening European Film Policy