We recently announced Watershed Disclosures, a first-of-its-kind product offering that enables companies to produce high-quality climate disclosures to meet mandatory and voluntary reporting requirements. As many climate leads are focused on reporting right now, we reached out to the Corporate Social Responsibility team at Kroll, a leading independent provider of risk and financial advisory solutions, to learn about their experience working with Watershed to respond to CDP this year.
CDP, originally known as the Carbon Disclosure Project, is the leading voluntary environmental disclosure system. The 130-question disclosure encourages leaders across business and government to enhance transparency and accelerate action related to climate change.
Paul Koppel leads Kroll’s Corporate Social Responsibility team and we also spoke to a Senior Associate, Corporate Social Responsibility.
Why is reporting to CDP important to Kroll?
Koppel: We believe that talking about our ESG work—and in particular, our climate work—can be a competitive advantage. CDP reporting provides an opportunity to showcase our ESG journey.
This disclosure is comprehensive and focuses on material ESG factors. Completing our CDP disclosure helps form our go-forward strategy, ensuring we are focused on our greatest opportunities.
Have you reported to CDP in the past?
Senior Associate, Corporate Social Responsibility: 2022 marked Kroll’s first submission to CDP. The process was new to us, and it required significant time and effort. With the Watershed’s support, the submission process was smoother in 2023.
What was your experience using Watershed’s Guided CDP report builder this year?
Koppel: With the help of Watershed’s software, we realized significant efficiencies in 2023.
Using Watershed helped us be more efficient so that we remained focused on the foundational work of reducing Kroll’s environmental footprint and taking further action in support of our global ESG initiatives.
Specifically, what made this year’s process easier and faster?
Senior Associate, Corporate Social Responsibility: Watershed’s platform helped us better understand each question, how CDP awards points and how to best frame our answers. As a relatively new professional to this field, I was lost in some of the technical language of the questions last year and spent time doing additional research to understand what CDP was really asking. Watershed’s technology increased our reporting efficiency.
Along with expediting the overall process, how else did using software instead of spreadsheets help?
Senior Associate, Corporate Social Responsibility: Pulling our footprint data directly into the report saved us a lot of time, allowing us to focus on the more complex, technical modules. Otherwise, we would have had to toggle between spreadsheet tabs and set up a series of calls with our GHG auditors to ensure we understood what methodology they were using to assure our footprint, further adding to the time required to complete the disclosure. Having one master dashboard also better enabled us to collaborate and tag in teammates to help with responses.
What does the time savings from using Watershed unlock for your team?
Senior Associate, Corporate Social Responsibility: There’s no real “reporting season” for our team—as soon as we finish one report, the next one is due or around the corner. For a small team with multiple disclosures to complete each year, we want to ensure they are done well and within a reasonable timeframe. And more importantly, reporting and disclosing is only a small part of our role—the real work is developing strategies to set Kroll up to be the most responsible corporate citizen it can be. Kroll is about action. Watershed helps us get the reporting done faster, so that we can spend even more time actioning and improving.
