Linkedin
Facebook
Email
more
Plan. Prepare. Respond with RSM: ESG for Agribusiness
There are growing demands from enterprise customers to disclose not only emissions data, but broader ESG information.
While current requests focus on carbon emissions, there is an increased pressure to disclose supply chain impacts on topics such as water management, employment practices, and customer health and safety.
Join Sarah Melville-Maguire, a member of the ESG and Climate Services team at RSM, as she discusses the changing consumer expectations around ESG and the benefits for farmers undertaking ESG reporting.
In this video, Sarah shares her insights on how large corporations are making big claims about their ESG goals, and how this is impacting primary producers and small businesses in the agriculture sector. She also discusses the benefits of early ESG disclosure for primary producers and agribusinesses, and how RSM can help businesses navigate the complexities of ESG reporting.
READ TRANSCRIPT
I'm Sarah Melville-Maguire, I work in the ESG and Climate Services team at RSM in our Perth office.
Over the last few years, we've seen some really significant changes in consumer expectations surrounding ESG.
They've become a lot more environmentally and socially conscious and as a result of that, we're seeing large corporations come out in public with these big claims about what they're going to achieve over the next few years as a result, that's filtering through the supply chain and coming to those primary producers and small businesses that work in the agriculture sector and changing the expectations about what they have to communicate to their business customers.
A really great example of this is late last year Coles came out and announced that they would like 75% of their suppliers to have an emissions reduction target by 2027, and that's heavily impacting those primary producers and ag businesses.
We do see quite a lot of benefits for those primary producers and agribusinesses that take those steps to disclose ESG topics early, particularly those high-pressure points around carbon emissions.
Primary producers and farmers present that information to their business customers. It presents a really easy win for those large multinational corporations that are trying to meet those targets that they've publicly stated.
We also see benefits for an industry-wide approach as we get more and more producers presenting this kind of information publicly.
We can identify some key trends that might be better addressed at an industry-wide level, rather than all of that burden falling on individual farmers.
ESG reporting is a particularly complex space, especially as most companies are wading into reporting this new information for the first time.
For those businesses that have direct interactions with the land, like agriculture businesses, the complexities of this are really amplified.
In addition to that, there's an enormous number of blogs and articles around on the internet and sifting through all of these to find genuine and solid advice can be really daunting for someone that doesn't interact with this information on a daily basis.
What we do with our clients is we sit down and understand what the core issues of their businesses specifically needs to deal with and what they need to respond to with their business customers and other stakeholders. 
Once we have those core topics, we break that down to understand what data is required for those and help those businesses understand where in their business that data might sit.
Once we have all of the data together, we can pull it together into an ESG disclosure report that can be suited to business customers, insurers or other stakeholders that the business might need to communicate to.
