On April 25th, Reanda Netherlands participated in the WTC Sustainable Career Event. This event offered students and soon to be graduates the opportunity to connect with companies and learn more about what the companies do on sustainability. And of course, it gave us the opportunity to meet with these passionate students, to share knowledge and spark a conversation.
We set up an interactive workshop where we discussed the increasing importance of sustainability and the new CSRD directive. With the upcoming requirement for mandatory assurance of sustainability reports, we wanted to show the attendees how audit is involved in sustainability and how Reanda plays a crucial role in ensuring the credibility of these reports.
As the students might be working on such reports in the future, we wanted for them to get a sense of what sustainability information will soon have to be reported by entities.
To do so, we presented the attendees with a practical case study and gave them topics that are material for a company, such as diversity, work safety, emissions; ESG matters for their sustainability report. Based on the company information we provided, we asked the students to rank them from least to most impactful.
It sparked a lively discussion. The attendees had some really interesting takes and they came up with things that we hadn’t fully considered yet. The company in the case file, for example, used a lot of water and energy to produce their products, which was initially considered to be a bad thing. But the students delved deeply into it and took a lot of different sides into account. Instead of just looking at the volume, they asked what kind of energy was used; was it from a renewable source, was it clean, green energy, like solar or wind energy? If so, maybe the fact that the company required a lot of energy was offset with a green option and that was considered to be a positive thing.
In the end, there was no wrong answer. We wanted to spark a conversation and we certainly did. We learned a lot that day and it was a constructive conversation. The students were very informed on the matters and, perhaps even more important, what they showed us is that they care deeply.
