Nobia prioritising action over sustainability rankings

– The climate crisis is one of the largest threats of our time. Therefore, we must focus on how to make the sustainability reporting directive drive real change and avoid drowning in parallel transparency initiatives, says Anna Hamnö Wickman, Group Sustainability Director at Nobia.

The financial sector is in the midst of implementing new sustainability reporting routines, to align with the requirements of the Sustainable Financing Directive. Furthermore, businesses are preparing for the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which will increase the sustainability reporting requirements significantly.

Within the European Union, the legislative aim is to make all important sustainability information from companies easily assessable, published as part of the statutory reports and with e-tagging. This drives transparency and standardisation to support comparisons and avoid green washing.

Moreover, the new legislation enables the financial sector to make sustainably informed decisions. Many of the voluntary additional transparency initiatives, such as Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), CDP and different rankings, have played important roles to align with the regulatory development.

For that reason, Nobia has concluded that continuing to answer detailed surveys for additional reporting schemes is not in favor of the company’s efforts to make a real change for planet earth – as it would require double work and risk under-mining the intention for the legislative development.   

– In order to prepare for the new way of sustainability reporting, we will not be able to prioritise answering additional reporting surveys or forms this year, unless there are specific customer requests that cannot be fulfilled by the corporate reporting publicly available, says Anna Hamnö Wickman.

Still, Nobia urges any investor or other stakeholder with an interest in learning more about sustainability at Nobia, or who is missing any crucial information in the current available reports, to reach out directly.

– We support information sharing and transparency, we are positive towards showing our sustainability performance. We want dialogue, and we want to improve the publicly published reports to fill all needs, Anna Hamnö Wickman concludes.