The role of interoperability in sustainability decisions: the case of CDP

Climate change, pollution, deforestation and water scarcity are important problems that human activities provoke. Business decisions and actions are the major causes of environmental degradation. Decisions based on broader aspects than financial ones are required to bring solutions to these environmental challenges. For that purpose, businesses need a transformation in their management and operations. The information is critical to ensure the decision-making process, in this study we present the corporate reporting ecosystem that businesses face today. The opportunities and pending challenges that this scenario of information signifies, and the role that the interoperability, understood as the ability to exchange and use information given a heterogeneous scenario of organisations and information, could play to achieve the business transformation, in the light of the European Framework for Interoperability (European Commission, 2015), are explored. CDP (formerly known as Carbon Disclosure Project) is the relevant case studied, as it is one of the most important environmental reporting initiatives in the world. In particular, we explore the role of interoperability in CDP through interviews with 17 CDP members. These respondents being a set of companies and their stakeholders, including investors, governments, scholars and NGOs. As a conclusion, we confirm that (1) interoperability has a role to play to empower more environmental actions in businesses; (2) specific characteristics of interoperability are demanded in legal, organisational, semantic and technical levels in order to consider environmental information in decisions; (3) the need for ICT solutions to tackle interoperability challenges is mainly required in the areas of data standardization, data connectivity and data integration with applications and processes.