Provide richer sustainability information

Links can be made between reports to reference related information. Sustainability disclosures frequently refer to data published in other documents, for example, financial reports. A report can include a footnote stating where a given fact originated and providing a link to view the original report. This method may cause the referred data to be difficult to find and verify. The most precise way to refer to data from other documents is to link directly to that data.

Links can be used within a report to quickly jump to related information. In sustainability reporting, various sections of the report refer to other sections of the same report. A report can include a footnote stating where a given fact is. This may cause the referred data to be difficult to find and verify. In digital reporting, data preparers can use hyperlinks to quickly navigate between related items. Using links instead of describing the relationship makes the related information:

The XBRL standard enables facts in sustainability reports to be marked as audited or unaudited. Sustainability reports can be audited to ensure the data in the report is correct and can be trusted. There may be one or more auditors of a report and each auditor may audit a number of different items. Sometimes the auditors audit the whole document, or their audit can be at the level of a fact, a section, a page, or a table.

Metadata associated with taxonomy concepts enables filtering of the taxonomy concepts. Taxonomies for sustainability standards tend to be large and it can be difficult to browse through all the taxonomy concepts searching for the required concept. Taxonomy concepts can be associated with additional metadata. Metadata allows data preparers and consumers to filter through taxonomy concepts to find the concepts they need to report their data. The extra metadata needs to be captured in the taxonomy to provide a comprehensive definition of disclosures and facilitate analysis.

The XBRL standard allows data preparers to use a concept from another taxonomy in their reports. Sustainability reports can include data that is not sustainability data. For example, the sustainability standard may require financial data to be included in a financial report. This data can be copied from the financial report into the sustainability report, but it will not contain the data attributes, like units, dates, or currency. These attributes are defined in the facts reported against taxonomy concepts used to create the financial report.