Ms. Weikl, you and Yusuf Avci have been working together on a major project for several months now: the KLINGER Group’s ESG report. How are you approaching this project?
INES WEIKL: I have been with the company since October 2021 and work in Group Accounting. As such, I cover all of our accounting and controlling activities, which come into play in sustainability reporting. I’m still new to the topic of sustainability as such. I’m more of a numbers person, and that’s where I can draw on my experience in preparing annual reports.
In preparation for meeting our reporting obligation, you have already spent the past months working on creating a standardized framework for the Group. What are the challenges here?
AVCI: The KLINGER Group has a diversified make-up, comprising a wide variety of companies. There’s a difference, of course, whether you are reporting climate data as a production company with energy-intensive manufacturing or as a trading company that operates large warehouses. So, we will have to make individual adjustments on site at each company to ensure that they can provide us with the required figures.
WEIKL: To distill the various approaches into a common denominator, we have defined ten fields of action (see infobox), which we derived from the ten ESG criteria. These apply equally to all subsidiaries. We’ve also drawn up specifications that say exactly who has to disclose what data, the period within which this should happen and even which unit of measurement to use.
When will the first ESG report be compiled?
AVCI: This comprehensive report is subject to strictly defined legal regulations and must be submitted for the first time in 2026. That means we have to collect the data for the 2025 financial year to be able to prepare and submit it within this time frame.
WEIKL: Just like annual reports, the ESG reports must undergo an external audit.
What findings from the report are you especially looking forward to?
WEIKL: The social data will certainly be interesting, because ESG reporting is also about the well-being of employees and not just about environmental issues. We have already done small-scale surveys in this area, but in future we will get a more comprehensive picture.
And it will also make the data comparable throughout the KLINGER Group for the first time. It’ll be interesting to see what effects the standards will have on a global scale, especially with regards to what potential we can still leverage here.