Sustainability reporting is rapidly shifting from a voluntary exercise to a regulated discipline that shapes how companies manage risk and make decisions. As climate rules tighten and diverge across regions, organisations are under pressure to turn ESG data into reliable business intelligence. Written by Issy Joslin

To explore how they can do this in practice, Sustainable Business Magazine recently sat down with Rajiv Jalim, Global Director of Sustainable Solutions at Novisto, a leading enterprise sustainability performance management platform.

From Pandemic Start-Up to Global Sustainability Partner  

Novisto was founded around six years ago against the backdrop of COVID and a transforming sustainability landscape. What had once been a largely voluntary, sometimes ad hoc set of initiatives was beginning to harden into structured programs with clear expectations around data, governance, and assurance.

“We were actually born during COVID,” Rajiv explains. “At the time, sustainability was moving from a voluntary, ad hoc programme into something more structured that required organisations to put a lot more thought and effort into it.”

Novisto’s platform was designed to address that shift directly. Rather than treating ESG as a separate universe of data, it brings sustainability information into the same kind of rigorous environment that finance, HR, and risk teams have long relied on.

“The platform helps organisations manage all of that sustainability information,” Rajiv says. “If I boil it down to the metrics within ESG, I’m talking about all things environmental, all things social, and all things that deal with the governance of the organisation, with the same traceability and rigour you’d expect from any robust data program.

Today, Novisto works with a wide range of organisations, from global Fortune 500 companies to smaller, fast-growing enterprises. Clients span sectors such as pharma, aviation, food production, chemicals, financial services, banking, and construction, and they are spread across multiple regions and regulatory environments.

Rajiv notes that this breadth has allowed Novisto to see how fast the ground is shifting. Sustainability teams are no longer simply compiling a glossy report at year end. They are now being asked to support decisions that affect enterprise risk, capital allocation, supply chains, and product strategy, all while navigating evolving requirements in markets like California and the European Union.

Making the Most of California’s SB 253 Extension    

One of the clearest examples of this new reality is California’s Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act (SB 253), which will require large companies doing business in the state to make detailed climate disclosures. The first submissions, initially planned for August, have been pushed back to November, effectively giving organisations three extra months.

Rajiv is quick to stress that this is not a reason to slow down. For many companies, the work was already well under way when the extension was announced.

“The timing of the announcement came fairly close,” he explains. “We were already in July, and the extension only came out last month, which means organisations were already preparing to submit for August. They had gathered data, done whatever level of assurance or auditing they wanted, and were getting ready to submit.”

From his perspective, the critical point is that the underlying requirements have not changed. The delay is a reprieve in timing, not in expectations.

“The three-month extension is really just a change in timing,” Rajiv says. “It’s not a change in what’s due. Companies should treat the delay as an opportunity to revisit gaps in their data collection, validate their figures, and improve the overall quality of the submission.”

For many organisations, SB 253 represents their first formal climate disclosure. That makes the quality of this initial filing particularly important, since it will serve as a reference point for years to come. Rajiv believes most companies should already be close to the finish line, and the extension should be used to strengthen, not restart.

“I’d be quite surprised if an organisation needed the three-month extension to start from zero,” he adds. “Given when the delay was announced, they should have 90 to 95 percent of the lift done. This is about refining the last mile: checking estimations, documenting assumptions, and tying everything up with a neat bow.”

Rajiv suggests that the additional time can be used to firm up estimates where better data is available, clarify boundaries and methodologies, close information gaps that were left as stopgaps, and ensure that governance and controls are clearly documented. It is also an opportunity to step back and ask whether the processes being built for SB 253 can form the foundation of a broader reporting strategy, rather than being treated as a one‑off compliance project.

“Treat this as a chance to build your baseline,” he says. “Your first submission under SB 253 will become the reference point you measure against in future years. The more robust it is, the more confidence you and your stakeholders will have in your trajectory.”

Creating a Framework for a Fragmented Regulatory Landscape    

While California’s law is a powerful catalyst, it is only one element of a complex global picture. In Europe, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is expanding the scope, depth, and assurance expectations of sustainability reporting. In the United States, SEC climate rules have been the subject of debate, revision, and legal challenge. For multinational organisations, that fragmentation creates real strategic questions.

Rajiv’s experience, drawn from working closely with global clients, is that the old, campaign-style model of sustainability reporting is now untenable.

“In the voluntary world, sustainability programmes were often ad hoc,” he reflects. “Each year the organisation would decide what to disclose and then run a data collection and reporting process for that one purpose. The move into mandatory reporting is forcing organisations to develop repeatable processes and stronger data governance.”

Many of the newer regulations explicitly require companies to explain how their sustainability programme has evolved year on year, and to report consistently against a baseline. This assumes a level of continuity and structure that one-off projects cannot provide.

At the same time, Rajiv points out that the emerging rules across jurisdictions are not as disjointed as they may appear at first glance:

“We’re seeing a lot of overlap between reporting requirements across different regions,” he says. “Before, you had all these acronyms and frameworks, and it felt like twenty different reports. Some of the standard setters have come together to make this easier, so that if you standardise how you report and set up repeatable processes, you can produce consistent, high-quality disclosures for multiple regimes.”

For organisations trying to design a single reporting strategy that can survive both SEC rollbacks and CSRD expansion, Rajiv’s advice is to focus on building a solid internal architecture first, and then map external requirements onto it:

“The companies that are doing this well are not building separate systems for each rule,” he explains. “They are creating one internal sustainability data model and governance framework, and then using that to serve SB 253, CSRD, SEC expectations, and investor requests. When rules change in one place, they don’t have to rebuild the foundation. They adjust the outputs.”

By anchoring the program in enterprise risk and strategy, rather than treating it purely as a compliance task, organisations can insulate themselves from swings in political sentiment:

“Regulation might move faster in Europe and slower in parts of the US, or the other way around,” Rajiv says. “If your reporting exists only because of a single rule, you are exposed every time that rule changes. If it exists because it informs your decisions on capital allocation, supply chain, and product innovation, the rules become one of the ways you use the data, not the reason you have it.”

Turning Existing Data Into Strategic Insight  

Another theme that comes through strongly in Rajiv’s perspective is that companies are not starting from a blank slate. Much of what sustainability regulations now demand has already been tracked internally for years, albeit for different purposes.

“If you look at many of the sustainability data sets being disclosed today, they’re not new,” Rajiv explains. “HR has always tracked workforce data. Health and safety teams have tracked incidents. Heavy‑emitting sectors have tracked air emissions, water quality, and waste for permits. Governance teams have documented policies, board composition, and shareholder rights. All of that already existed.”

The real transformation lies in how that data is interpreted and connected.

“Sustainability asks how you take those data sets and analyse them through the lens of corporate risk and business opportunity,” he says. “That is where it stops being a ‘do the right thing’ exercise and becomes part of how you run the business.”

This reframing has changed the internal dynamics of sustainability teams. What was once a relatively isolated function is now expected to coordinate activity across finance, HR, operations, risk, and product development.

“It can no longer be done as a siloed, standalone exercise,” Rajiv notes. “You need finance to bring in the financial models, to talk about capital allocation and financial risk. You need HR for employee retention, health and safety, and insurance risk. You need product teams to talk about innovation to address climate or supply chain risks. All of that goes beyond what a sustainability function can do alone.”

Rajiv often describes the sustainability lead or chief sustainability officer as a kind of conductor:

“I like to describe the sustainability function as the conductor of a symphony,” he says. “They don’t play the instruments, but they are responsible for bringing everyone together in their own specialty to create the music. In this case, the music is improved business performance, greater resilience, and better management of risks that were not quantified before, like supply chain disruptions, transition risks, and climate impacts.”

In practice, that means using the pressure of regulations such as SB 253 and CSRD to push the organisation toward a more integrated view of risk and opportunity, rather than simply producing more detailed reports.

Why Technology Is Now Mission Critical  

As sustainability reporting becomes more complex and more closely scrutinised, the question of tooling moves from convenience to necessity. In most core business functions, the idea of managing large-scale, sensitive processes without specialised systems would now be unthinkable. Rajiv argues that ESG is no different:

“We all use technology because we want things to be faster and more accurate, and we don’t want to be bogged down by tedious tasks,” he says. “Those benefits apply exactly the same way to a sustainability programme.”

He uses HR as a simple illustration “If we said we were no longer using software to track and pay employees, everyone would say it makes no sense,” Rajiv points out. “You’d expect gaps in the data, security problems, audit issues, legal risk. Those are the same kinds of consequences you face in sustainability if you try to manage regulatory‑grade reporting with tools that don’t provide traceability or controls.”

Platforms like Novisto are built to reduce those risks. They are designed to make sustainability processes repeatable and auditable, to protect institutional knowledge, and to provide a clear line of sight from a published figure back to its source.

“Our job is to ensure that the processes being set up are repeatable and that they free up time for sustainability managers and analysts,” Rajiv explains. “You don’t want your team trapped in spreadsheets. You want them focused on analysis and decisions, knowing the data is accurate and trustworthy.”

This becomes even more critical when organisations are using the same ESG data to support multiple purposes: meeting SB 253 timelines, responding to investors, complying with CSRD, and informing internal risk models.

“At the end of the day, if you make multi‑million‑dollar business decisions on poor data, the decisions will be flawed,” Rajiv concludes. “When you wrap that in compliance and regulation, this moves from a nice‑to‑have to a must‑get‑right.”

For companies now facing their first SB 253 deadline, the three‑month extension offers more than extra time. It is an invitation to treat climate disclosure as the beginning of a more disciplined, integrated approach to sustainability data, one that can withstand shifting rules and politics, and turn reporting into real business intelligence.