The skills that make a strong head of procurement are exactly the skills ESG work requires: managing complex supplier relationships, coordinating across departments, tracking deliverables against deadlines, and negotiating terms. Most procurement leaders do not realize this when ESG first lands on their desk. It feels like a new discipline with unfamiliar terminology. In practice, it is the same work applied to a new set of requirements.

ESG requests land on finance's desk regularly, and usually without much context. A request for twelve months of utility bills. A question about total spend with a specific vendor. A travel expense breakdown by employee. On their own, these look like routine data pulls. What most CFOs and controllers do not always know is what that data is being used for and why the quality of it matters as much as it does.

ESG is landing on general counsel's desk more often, and not always through channels that make the scope obvious. A customer contract with new sustainability representations. A GP questionnaire that nobody else picked up. A request to review a European regulation that may or may not apply to the company. An internal policy that needs sign-off before it can go out.

If a customer has asked you for sustainability information and you are trying to figure out where to start, the most important thing you can do before spending any time or money is read the request carefully. Most private companies that end up doing too much, too fast, skipped this step.

If a GP or customer has asked you for ESG reporting, you have probably already figured out what they want. The harder question is how to actually produce it — where the data comes from, who in your organization needs to be involved, and what the output should look like.

If your GP has started asking for ESG data, your board needs to know about it. Not because ESG is a governance trend worth discussing in the abstract, but because responding to a GP's ESG requirements takes time, resources, and in some cases capital investment.

If you are in a leadership or legal role at a PE-backed company, ESG requests from your GP are probably landing on your desk more often. They come as formal questionnaires, data requests tied to annual reporting cycles, or pre-deal diligence packages. Whatever the format, someone in your organization is expected to own the response.

If you supply goods or services to a pharmaceutical company, something has probably landed in your inbox recently: a sustainability questionnaire, an updated RFP with new environmental requirements, or a direct request for your carbon footprint and a science-based emissions reduction target.

You've finished your first GHG inventory, so you know your Scope 1 and 2 numbers. The next question is usually what to do about them.