Reporting Matters asks who sustainability reports are for
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) has opened the 2026 edition of Reporting Matters, its assessment of corporate sustainability reporting, with an article on turning sustainability data into something people can act on.
The starting premise is that reporting creates value only when the right people use it to make decisions. Those people want different things. Investors and rating agencies look at risk, governance and resilience; boards use the information to set strategy and capital spending; procurement teams use it to assess suppliers; employees use it to decide where to work.
WBCSD notes that AI is now an audience for sustainability information in its own right, helping users work through growing volumes of content, and warns that hallucinations and generic language have to be managed if reporting is to stay trustworthy. That is a strong argument for structured data. Information tagged against a taxonomy, with each fact carrying a defined meaning, can be retrieved by a machine without guesswork {Ed: and a far lower token count!}. If sustainability reports are to serve investors, boards and buyers, and the AI tools many of them now use, decision-useful has to mean machine-readable too.
Read more here.
