New article "ESG 2.0 - Digital Ethics as a New Dimension of Sustainability" published
Do companies need a new dimension of sustainability?
Our awareness is changing: ethical challenges such as poverty, discrimination, exploitation and destruction of the environment are in a complex relationship with each other and need to be solved everywhere in the world. This change in perspective is evident in a new prioritisation on the investor side, changing customer expectations as well as transparency regulations.
In business, new data- and algorithm-based business models are seen as the foundation of future business activities. The introduction of a company's own data strategy, the development of new data-driven business models or the conversion of analogue to digital business models affects the entire company. However, the increased use of digital technologies puts companies at risk of neglecting or overlooking ethical considerations.
Digital ethics/CDR as a component of ESG
To prevent this, companies can, for example, engage in data ethics without explicitly doing so in the context of their ESG commitments. However, a clear integration into the company's own ESG programme enables the company to report in a structured way on its own corporate digital responsibility (CDR). CDR/digital ethics thus becomes a mandatory component of ESG as a logical consequence of the path taken to swear corporate management worldwide to the criteria of sustainability.
The article "ESG 2.0 - Digital Ethics as a New Dimension of Sustainability" provides a basic classification of the complex topic - from CSR to ESG to CDR/Digital Ethics - and gives a legal overview and outlook.
The authors of the article, Dr. André T. Nemat, Dr. Andrea Panzer-Heemeier and Prof. Dr. Cordula Meckenstock, combine their interdisciplinary knowledge from the corporate, academic and legal perspectives to classify the much-discussed digital-ethical responsibility of companies and to show a path to sustainable corporate governance.
Weitere Informationen zum Heft 04/2022 der ESG, Zeitschrift für nachhaltige Unternehmensführung, herausgegeben vom C.H.BECK-Verlag unter https://rsw.beck.de/zeitschriften/esg.
