Watershed – the carbon accounting and climate disclosure platform, announced on June 7th the launch of a new product called Watershed Disclosures – a first-of-its-kind Watershed offering, enabling companies to produce high-quality climate disclosures to meet mandatory and voluntary reporting requirements.
The platform helps companies understand which climate disclosures apply to them, it helps them build multiple disclosure reports with audit-grade data, and develop best-in-class answers informed by peers’ responses and expert guidance.
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The climate intelligence platform could potentially save legal teams weeks to research climate reporting obligations as for most companies, climate disclosure is challenging. According to Watershed’s announcement, climate data is fragmented across different departments, in different formats and each disclosure framework has distinct requirements so there is no simple way for the reporting to be replicated year over year.
Watershed Disclosures was built to address the challenges of producing reports that satisfy compliance, legal, and financial teams, enabling the companies to:
- Assess their requirements with a regulatory checkup – companies can quickly identify climate disclosures that apply to their business, like the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The regulatory checkup also makes recommendations for participation in voluntary reporting frameworks like CDP and the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). The tool also provides recommended disclosure timelines and requirements.
- Build high-quality reports, faster – companies can create reports efficiently using guided workflows with embedded climate intelligence. The product automatically pulls in audit-grade data from their current emissions measurements, targets, and reduction plans to populate multiple reports simultaneously. This allows companies to scale reporting, making the reporting process easier and more reliable year over year.
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- Create best-in-class responses – companies can browse high-quality disclosure examples and publicly available responses from peers to help them produce better responses for their own disclosures. The product also provides companies with a proprietary risks and opportunities library to help them understand and include potential climate risks and opportunities for their business, a requirement of many disclosure frameworks.
In May 2023, the company also announced the launch of a new Policy Advisory Board of climate policy leaders with experience at the SEC, TCFD, CDP, and beyond. This step is a testimony of Watershed’s direction in developing expertise to help its customers navigate the new climate economy. Businesses around the world are facing a pivotal moment for climate disclosure as global climate policy and regulations are strengthening.
