Cority + Enhesa: A partnership at work

As new global sustainability requirements emerge, the existing synergy between Cority and Enhesa continues to support clients in meeting these challenges. Here, we explore how and why the partnership works — and the way requirements are evolving, creating new challenges and opportunities for global companies.

The global market for environmental health and safety (EHS) software is growing rapidly: from an estimated $1.8B in 2023 to as much as $3.1B in 2028, as reported by research firm Verdantix, drawing on Green Quadrant benchmarking — a compound annual growth rate of 11.5%. One trend that’s driving this growth, according to Verdantix, is the impact of requirements for sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG), along with associated net zero targets and investor expectations of stronger and more reliable emissions data.

Bringing together up-to-date, accurate, and harmonized regulatory content with the technology solutions companies use to track and record compliance, solution offerings from Enhesa and Cority are closely integrated to help companies meet these needs.

Recently, Enhesa’s Expert Services Strategy Director and Forbes contributor, Mary Foley, and Enhesa’s Strategic Alliances Manager, Michiel Scholberg, had the chance to share their thoughts with Carrie Young, Vice President of Strategic Solutions at Cority, about how the evolving landscape of sustainability and ESG, and the increasing demand for Environmental Management Systems, are fostering the collaboration between Enhesa and Cority.

An introduction to Cority with Carrie Young

Navigating the ever-changing regulatory landscape is an ongoing challenge for EHS professionals — especially for multinationals operating across many regions. Through the partnership between Enhesa and Cority, clients can overcome this regulatory complexity.

Offering SaaS-based solutions for EHS, sustainability, quality, and analytics, Cority has integrated Enhesa’s regulatory content inside its platform to help organizations standardize and streamline compliance requirements, data management, and sustainability reporting programs.

With her extensive background in the EHSQ (EHS and quality) industry, Carrie Young has experienced first-hand the evolution of software solutions that address these challenges:

“I‘ve been around environmental data management pretty much my whole career. I was an Air Quality Consultant when Title V permitting was first introduced. This regulation created an intersection between environmental consulting and environmental data management spurring the creation of the EHS software industry in general. Our projects went from helping customers apply for permits, to helping them configure a software system that would calculate emissions and manage compliance obligations.

“I moved into the chemical manufacturing industry only to realize that the analysis and reporting done in highly complex facilities was being performed in Excel spreadsheets rather than centralized databases.

“These two experiences led me to join the EHS software industry where I helped companies implement and integrate EHS software into their operations to enable better performance reporting and decision making. I led the company’s professional services team and ran a project management function to ensure that our business transformation projects to automate EHS workflows were successful.”

Transitioning from a proliferation of systems (and spreadsheets) to a centralized platform is key to accurate reporting. Young describes the evolution of her role in software, specifically at Cority, taking her from professional services to strategic solutions — helping customers deploy business transformation supported by the platform.

“Three years ago I joined Cority as the Vice President of Strategic Solutions. Our team architects solutions and projects that will solve our customers’ critical EHS needs using a market-leading software platform.”

Enhesa on-board: Providing EHS and ESG requirements

Mary Foley is the Expert Services Strategy Director at Enhesa and a Forbes contributor. She writes about the significant growth of sustainability reporting and compliance regulations and requirements in just the last couple of years. This includes how that growth is driving an increasing need for companies to know what they’re responsible for, regulation by regulation, jurisdiction by jurisdiction — which is what Enhesa’s solutions for both EHS Intelligence and Corporate Sustainability provide:

“For the first two months of 2024 alone, we calculated that there had been 522 new regulatory developments focused on corporate sustainability, globally.” These include global requirements like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), along with guidelines issued by the Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative (SSE) on “how to report ESG information to investors. These all come on top of some 1,300 regulatory developments reported in 2023 and 800 regulatory developments in 2022,” Foley said in her Forbes article, 500+ New Reasons To Sweat The Details On Sustainability: Global And Local Rulemaking Proliferates.

Young also remarked on the recent increase in both EHS and sustainability compliance requirements and how it impacts resources.

Young noted that “getting the financial markets involved, and approaching this through a financial lens with respect to ESG activities puts a lot more resources towards getting this done correctly and making sure people are focusing on the right thing.”

Young suggests that the next ‘big thing’ will be connecting EHS data with ESG reporting — a change Enhesa CEO Peter Schramme is also keen to see. With the overlap between EHS and ESG reporting requirements estimated at around 60%, according to Enhesa experts. And Schramme believes that EHS compliance is the foundation of ESG reporting.

Young explains that pulling the two together will come with its own challenges for companies to overcome.

“The big thing now is that people are doing their ESG reports. The next thing will be connecting it down to those base level systems that we’ve been using in EHS for many years. We have ESG reporting, and we have local permit reporting. Pulling those together accurately is the challenge that we’re facing today.”

A partnership at work: Cority’s platform + Enhesa’s data

Enhesa provides the regulatory content and intelligence to help Cority’s customers address these challenges.

According to Foley, “the real challenge companies face now as they walk a tightrope between regulatory compliance requirements and investor scrutiny is divorcing themselves from the emotion and political connotations of ESG. Instead, they need to link their sustainability initiatives to quantifiable business metrics.” — (Read more in Reports Of The Death Of ESG Are Greatly Exaggerated on forbes.com)

In addition to the much-discussed, measured, and reported climate change disclosure requirements, which fall under the ‘E’ of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), biodiversity is a newer ‘E’ topic getting notice from companies.

As Foley puts it: “At the heart of the issue are new standards that address the impacts of business activities on biodiversity loss, which is the degradation of natural ecosystems due to changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change and invasion of alien species and pollution. Put simply, regulators and standards bodies now want to know not only what companies are releasing into the air, but also what may be leeching into soil, running off into streams and oceans and affecting wildlife habitats. And, they want to be able to track it throughout the product lifecycle, from resource acquisition to manufacturing, including the entire production supply chain and through to the eventual product disposal. That means these rules will also potentially impact non-industrial, office-based companies too, few of which have experience with this type of risk management.” (Read more in the Forbes article, Businesses Scramble As Global Regulators Set Their Sights On Biodiversity Impacts)

And the importance of the S and G are growing, too. Young remarked that Europe is ahead in terms of setting these requirements within regulations. She suggests however, that the US has been doing rigorous air emission calculations for over 30 years providing a good framework for calculating Scope 1 emissions. She comments on the challenges some of the more calculation-intense metrics pose.

Young noted: “The US has focused a lot on establishing the methodologies and systems to calculate and report air, water, and waste emissions. It was an easy next step to introduce the calculation of Scope 1 GHG emissions because equipment level air calculations for other pollutants had been done for so many years. ESG standards have more recently put a focus on Scope 2 and Scope 3 GHG emissions, but the frameworks for how to calculate those were not as readily available as they were for scope 1 slowing down the adoption of these metrics.

 “Another additional complexity is the granularity of the data for EHS performance and compliance reporting versus ESG reporting. When we review air emissions in a sustainability report, it’s often at a site level whereas performance and compliance reporting is done at the equipment level. The challenge is establishing the connection between equipment level information and site level information to ensure consistent emissions reporting across all reports and to all bodies.”

It’s about closing the gap between reporting systems and frameworks. Young elaborates:

“The question becomes: How do we ensure uniform reporting of emissions to each organization requiring reporting? And how do we aggregate equipment level information to a site level to fulfil all of our needs and still remain accurate?”

How businesses can deliver on sustainability requirements

Young stated that the increase in regulations is starting to mean that investment in new systems makes good financial sense: “With these changes, I think [even] mid-market companies are finding it easier to justify the expense. They see it’s treated like a financial system and not just an environmental solution.”

Indeed, in discussing emerging requirements like the CSDDD approved in May 2024, Foley points to the need for increased transparency throughout the value chain — a question that has data at its heart. She explains: “The mandate will also introduce a standard set of benchmarks for evaluating sustainability risk, which will, in turn, provide more data and metrics for investors and consumers to continue to evaluate businesses through a sustainability lens. The end-result is a foundation of sustainability-oriented risk metrics that will ultimately link business fundamentals, such as profitability and earnings growth with environmental and human rights risks.”  

With respect to climate disclosure reporting requirements, even the SEC regulation currently on hold by the US judicial system ‘has teeth’, Foley said. “The clearest sign of the SEC not backing down in the face of widespread pushback is the string of recent enforcement actions the agency has brought through its Enforcement Task Force Focused on Climate and ESG Issues. Quietly launched in March of 2021, the task force has been focused on identifying material gaps or misstatements in issuers’ disclosure of climate risks under existing rules. In practical terms, that’s primarily meant going after asset managers for greenwashing.” (For more information, read Ignore The SEC’s ESG Agenda At Your Own Risk on forbes.com)

Young agrees: “The SEC regulation, for example, will apply to many companies. This is going to make it easier to justify the need to have accurate, auditable, and transparent information through software and platforms that make emissions management and compliance more manageable.”

Smarter solutions for changing demands

It’s clear that the increasing complexity and demands of regulations for EHS and sustainability/ESG mean companies must become more coordinated and better able to anticipate and manage changing requirements. Solutions offered by partnerships like that of Cority and Enhesa make content, intelligence, and data centralized, traceable, and easier to manage. Global companies must consider how to make this transformation, moving from the antiquated approach of spreadsheets and other manual processes to automated, digital, and enterprise-wide solutions, which help make tracking change easier, provide a foundation for capturing and aggregating data and reporting, and help organizations manage the risk of serious impacts.

About Cority

For over 35 years, Cority has empowered every employee, from the field to the board room, to make a difference by reducing risks and creating a safer, healthier, and more sustainable world. Developed by EHS and sustainability experts, Cority’s people-first software solutions help companies address the challenges they encounter.