Review Article
Volume 8 Issue 2
Sameera Fernandes*
February 03, 2026
DOI : 10.56831/PSEN-08-251
Abstract
Sustainability has moved from narrative to necessity, and the next phase of ESG is no longer about intent—it is about engineering: how organizations measure, validate, and operationalize environmental and social performance with the same rigor they apply to financial reporting, safety, and quality. Yet many ESG programs still depend on fragmented spreadsheets, inconsistent boundaries, and “best effort” estimates that cannot withstand assurance. This creates a trust gap that slows decision-making, limits access to sustainable finance, and undermines confidence among regulators, investors, employees, and customers.
This editorial proposes a practical engineering approach to close that gap: build an audit-ready “Sustainability Data Stack” that integrates materiality, data architecture, calculation engines, internal controls, and decision loops. The objective is not to produce more dashboards, but to create traceable, reproducible sustainability metrics that reliably inform capital allocation, procurement, product design, and risk management. The article outlines design principles (traceability, interoperability, governance by design, and human-centered workflows), a reference architecture, and a staged implementation roadmap—from a minimum viable system to enterprise-scale integration. Finally, it argues that the organizations most prepared for the low-carbon economy will be those that treat ESG as a systems engineering challenge: measurable, testable, and continuously improved.
Keywords: Sustainability engineering; ESG data; engineering management; audit readiness; digital transformation
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