Sustainability reporting isn’t just for large corporates. ESG Essentials gives smaller businesses a simple, proportionate way to disclose ESG performance — helping you meet stakeholder expectations without the complexity of formalised reporting regimes.
ESG Essentials helps SMEs get ahead of their competitors, providing a structured disclosure report that can be shared repeatedly across multiple stakeholders and relationships.
The process helps you demonstrate your sustainability journey while not impacting the day to day challenges of ensuring the success of the organisation.
Why ESG Essentials
Streamlined ESG reporting – Provides a once in the year process, creating a standardised reusable, efficient reporting basis which includes limited assurance.
Stronger supply chain positioning – Meet the growing ESG data demands of large customers, making your business a more attractive, lower-friction partner.
Enhanced trust and reputation – Build credibility with customers, partners, and employees through transparent sustainability reporting, and stand out in public tenders.
Verified Carbon Emissions – Provide stakeholders with a Carbon Emissions intensity factor for your business, which helps your reporting and that of customers.
Enhanced trust and reputation – Build credibility with customers, partners, and employees through transparent sustainability reporting, and stand out in public tenders.
Better internal risk management – Gain clearer visibility into environmental, social, and governance risks and opportunities across your business.
Scaled pricing framework – A simplified alternative to ESG Benchmarks, full certification assessment that scales to your ambition and resources.
Essentials Core Elements
Essentials Overview
The Essentials Disclosure Report is founded on the core elements of ESG, Environment, Social and Governance, incorporating a Carbon Emissions report. The process is aligned with and developed from the Basic Module of Voluntary SME (VSME) Sustainability Disclosure standards developed by the European EFRAG for the use across the EU.
The Essentials Report enhances the VSME Basic Module, incorporating other key ESG metrics relevant to customers, together with independent assurance on some of the core elements disclosed. This assurance and verification is provided by the ESG Benchmark team who are AS1000 certified.
Essentials Process
We have designed the ESG Essentials process to be as simple and straightforward as possible.
Organisations answer a selection of questions through our online portal, uploading the relevant data and supporting evidence, including information and invoices used to calculate their carbon emissions.
We review the submitted information and carbon calculations, ensuring it is supported by suitable evidence. Once verified, we provide the organisation with an ESG Essentials Sustainability Disclosures Report.
The report includes the relevant ESG data and the organisation’s CO₂e emissions intensity metric based on revenue, providing a clear and consistent measure that can be shared with customers, clients and other stakeholders.
Organisations also receive an ESG Essentials Verification Certificate, which they can use to demonstrate that their sustainability disclosures have been independently reviewed and verified.
*Responses are only relevant where these apply to the organisation.
