In conversation with

For us, reporting is a way of communicating what we do, but we don't implement something because we have to report on it. We do it because we believe it is the right thing for the company – because it helps us to be more resilient or more successful – and then we report it.

Reporting gives us a way to make our activities visible to our stakeholders, so they can understand what we are doing, why we are doing it and the progress we are making. At the same time, reporting gives us a useful structure to feed into discussions and decisions across the business.

The double materiality assessment is at the core of this, helping us understand where our most significant impacts, risks and opportunities lie and where we should focus our resources. That is useful for external reporting and internally. It provides a clear framework for conversations with senior management and the Board about what the outside world wants us to talk about, what we are doing about it and how those actions can help us manage risks, capture opportunities and make the company more resilient.

At Clariant, we have a long history of sustainability reporting, so mandatory reporting hasn’t fundamentally changed our overall approach. What it has done is bring greater focus to our material topics and to how we structure our disclosures around them. While mandatory reporting hasn't changed our focus, it has accelerated our efforts to communicate more consistently our policies, actions, and outcomes across all our material topics.

The double materiality assessment has also helped make our prioritization more fact-based. It hasn’t revealed complete surprises, but it provides a clearer rationale for why we focus time and resources on certain topics rather than others. We can then break those impacts, risks and opportunities down to individual business units, because what is highly material for one business may be less significant for another.

Some of the clearest feedback we get from stakeholders comes through the direct conversations we have. These tell us which parts of the report stakeholders have read and where they might still have questions. It shows us what has been understood and where we can improve for the next cycle. We also use the conclusions of ratings and rankings to see what has been understood from our report and where we can provide more clarification.

We see audiences using the information in different ways. Investors are particularly interested in issues that affect the company's resilience and long-term direction of growth, while employees use the report as a repository for sustainability information without having to go directly to the sustainability team.

What customers are asking for has changed significantly. Increasingly, they don't just want to see one-time, product-specific value. They want to understand our sustainability roadmap, particularly on climate but also on other sustainability dimensions: what are our targets, where are we heading and how do we plan to get there? That gives them confidence in our future direction and, ultimately, what that means for the products they buy from us.

This year, we launched an external AI bot called Clarita alongside our integrated report. Clarita is trained specifically on the report, so customers and other stakeholders – including our own employees – can ask questions based on their specific needs. Rather than having to read through the report or search for information themselves, they can ask, for example, about Clariant's climate strategy and receive an answer together with a reference to where that information appears in the report.

While data collection is still very resource-intensive, AI can make the reporting process more efficient. For example, when reporting requirements change, it can help map existing information against a new structure or tagging system. But human-led judgment remains essential when we need to interpret what the information means for Clariant, make decisions based on it or develop new content, actions or KPIs. Everything we report is ultimately checked for validity by a human being.

Finally, we’re also using AI to analyze the sustainability reports of our suppliers and customers. More standardized reporting is making that information easier to understand and compare, and AI enables us to analyze reports to understand where companies are on their sustainability journey, what they are focusing on and how Clariant fits into their needs and priorities.

We break down the collective impacts, risks and opportunities identified at corporate level for our individual business units. Their significance can vary widely from one business to another, so this helps each business to understand which material topics and specific sustainability issues could most influence its future, and where to take action.

We also use the information to identify certain topics, like raw materials with potential environmental impacts that could also create risks for the company. That information triggers discussions with our procurement team and the relevant businesses about how we engage with suppliers and whether there are opportunities to use alternative raw materials.

Looking ahead, we want to strengthen the connection between our corporate-level sustainability information and our portfolio value program, which assesses sustainability at product level. Connecting those perspectives more closely could create a powerful system – combining a clear global view with information that can support product-specific value propositions and portfolio steering.

Ultimately, I'd like to see sustainability become a clear parameter in all product and purchasing decisions, alongside price and performance. That would significantly accelerate the sustainability transformation globally.

We need to focus sustainability on how it can create opportunities and reduce impacts, rather than aiming for absolute perfection in reporting. We need robust information, but we shouldn't become so focused on making everything 150% bulletproof that we lose sight of creating change.

An annual report or sustainability statement remains extremely important. It helps to show the commitment and progress to the external world, while internally it helps you organize your thinking about where you are and where you want to go. But we should never forget that it’s not about the reporting – it's really about the change and impact we can achieve.