Collecting sustainability data

Collecting sustainability information in a standardised way ensures the data is clear and available for everyone involved.

Follow these guidelines to ensure the consistency of the reported sustainability data and improve the reported data readability and availability.

Intended audience:

Regulators
They set out the reporting requirements.
Standard setters
They define the data relevant to a particular topic as a digital data standard.
Data preparers
They use the data standard to gather and report the required data.

Specifying data to report

This article outlines general guidelines for designing a taxonomy that facilitates collecting sustainability data. Sustainability standards specify which data should be collected in sustainability reports. Sustainability standards differ between different regulatory bodies. The XBRL standard provides a common approach to enable collecting the data despite those differences. Following these guidelines ensures the data you collect follows that common approach and enables collecting the data despite the differences between sustainability standards.

Formatting reported data

This article outlines general guidelines for designing a taxonomy that ensures the reported data is human-readable and machine-readable. The format of a data report determines the usefulness of the data contained in the report. Sustainability reports can be submitted in various human-readable forms. To make the data more useful, the sustainability report should also be machine-readable. This enables the consumers of the data to use analysis tools to compare data gathered from several sources.

Including narrative data

This article outlines general guidelines for designing a taxonomy that includes narrative data. Narrative text may contain sustainability information that answers regulatory requirements. iXBRL allows you to tag sections, paragraphs, sentences, and words that have usable data. Standard setters and data preparers should take the following into consideration: Design the taxonomy so that the concepts are arranged in logical groups to help the data preparer when creating narrative text for tagging.