No data, no seat at the table: the case for a Sustainability knowledge base

Executives don’t make decisions on ambition. They make them on data.

Right now, most sustainability teams are still stuck with scattered, fragile data.
Numbers live in spreadsheets, shared drives, ERP exports, inboxes, and people’s heads. Context is missing. Owners change. By the time you find what you need, it’s already outdated. 

So answers are inconsistent, slow, or incomplete, and trust in sustainability data erodes. When the business stops trusting the numbers, the team gets pushed back into a support role.

In our latest Sustainability Outlook report, we argued that sustainability teams will face a simple choice: deliver or get cut. Either you solve the data problem, or you keep bleeding time and credibility until the CFO takes the headcount away.

This is how sustainability loses influence.The fix isn’t “more reports” or “better processes.”

It’s a single source of truth for sustainability data.

A system where you know exactly which data points are required, where they come from, and how they connect. That’s what turns sustainability from a reporting function into a decision function.

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Why a single source of truth matters

• Credibility: Executives make decisions based on reliable numbers. If your team can’t provide them, someone else will.
• Consistency: Different stakeholders (customers, regulators, investors, banks, suppliers) need the same data in different formats. Have one version of truth across all reports, questionnaires, audits, and ratings.
• Efficiency: Chasing the same data for fifty different reports is wasted time. A structured source means collect once, use many times.
• Influence: Walk into a meeting with verified data on cost, risk, or opportunity, and you stop being an “optional” invite.

Without this, sustainability remains a cost center. With it, sustainability becomes decision-critical.

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How to build it

The challenge is real: most companies are complex: multi-site, multi-country, and running on a patchwork of systems. The risk almost everyone runs into when building a “single source of truth” is overengineering it: spending years trying to unify everything before delivering a single result, while the team stays stuck in manual processes.

The trick to not boiling the ocean is simple: don’t.

Start small and iterate.

• Begin with what you need now.
• Deliver a first usable version quickly.
• Expand only when the gaps become clear.

Here’s the process we follow when building a Sustainability Twin™ — our proprietary knowledge base structure for complex industrial companies:

1. Map external demand
Start with what stakeholders already ask for: questionnaires, reports, ratings. Break them down into recurring data points.

2. Capture evidence sources
For each data point, link to where it already exists: policies, SDS sheets, ERP exports, audit reports, EHS systems. Don’t reinvent the wheel, connect it.

3. Translate into a structure
Cluster requests into themes that reflect real demand: ESG, KYC, Product Compliance, Trade/CBAM. This becomes the backbone of your sustainability taxonomy.

4. Build a baseline
Use existing disclosures and documents to stand up the first version. It won’t be perfect, but it’s enough to see coverage and gaps.

5. Run continuous improvement
Each new request is checked against the baseline. Gaps are logged, coverage expands, and system integrations gradually replace manual uploads. Over time, your source of truth becomes both broader and more automated.

It is a project — but not a multi-year one. Built pragmatically, the first operational version can be running in 2–3 months in-house, or in weeks if supported by purpose-built systems.

The payoff

You answer once and use it everywhere. Your team stops chasing data and starts enabling decisions. And when the business faces questions on strategy, budgets, carbon costs, supply chain risk, or compliance exposure, sustainability is at the table, because the numbers only exist if you bring them.

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Where technology fits

You can maintain a knowledge base manually: with spreadsheets, macros, and shared drives. But the obvious downside is that it will be slow, fragile, and person-dependent.

Specialized systems accelerate the same process: extracting data points from stakeholder requests, mapping them to documents and systems, and keeping coverage current through automated gap reports and integrations.

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How we support this at beSirius

We follow the approach above in designing a Sustainability Twin™ — a knowledge base that captures every recurring data point, links it to evidence, and keeps it up to date as requests evolve. The Twin becomes an operating system for sustainability: one place where the data is structured, verified, and ready to use across reports, ratings, and decisions.

At beSirius, we don’t believe in more forms, we believe in making forms obsolete.
We don’t believe in standardizing complexity away, we believe in making complexity computable.
And we don’t believe sustainability teams should be data clerks.
We believe they should drive revenue, strategy, and value creation.

Our work with clients focuses on getting that first version of the Twin live quickly, usually in weeks. And then continuously expanding coverage and automation until the system runs ahead of demand.

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Interested in learning more?

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