Proving sustainability builds trust
How independent assurance turns green commitments into trusted performance
In today’s world, sustainability is about coupling ambition to metrics in order to demonstrate performance and progress. From carbon emission reduction and circularity to supply chain due diligence, customers, investors and regulators expect your organization to offer proof, not promises. In this article, Stephen Burt, Carbon & Sustainability Services Director at NQA (a Kiwa Company), and Raoul Mancke, Global Business Sector Leader Sustainability at Kiwa, explain why sustainability has become a strategic business priority and why independent assurance is essential for building trust.
Sustainability then and now
Stephen has worked in sustainability for 25 years, and has seen the shift firsthand. “When I started in this field, it was tough to talk to companies about sustainability. They just weren't interested," he says. Senior leadership teams tended to treat any new sustainability development as a "doom and gloom scenario" to be managed rather than an opportunity. Today, he paints a very different picture: organizations increasingly see sustainability as a way to stand out, keep existing customers, and win new ones. It is an important part of commercial conversations, influencing procurement decisions, access to investment, risk management, product development and corporate strategy.
Raoul compares the maturing of sustainability with how quality management and information security evolved over previous decades. "It began with making commitments. Now, stakeholders want to see the evidence. Customers want to be legally assured. The question is no longer whether sustainability performance is important for your organization, but how convincingly you can demonstrate it.”
Regulations are a strong driver
One of the biggest factors driving this shift is changing regulations. Across the world, new legislation is requiring greater transparency around environmental performance, supply chain due diligence, and sustainability reporting.
In the UK, new requirements such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and the UK Sustainability Reporting Standards are making emissions and broader sustainability reporting a legal requirement for some companies from 2027. In the European Union, directives such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive are strengthening expectations around sustainability reporting, supply chain due diligence and environmental claims. Raoul notes that, although recent reforms have simplified reporting requirements, the underlying sustainability goals remain the same.
The pressure is also felt in procurement. Stephen compares it to ISO 9001, the globally recognized benchmark for quality management systems (QMS): this standard essentially became a requirement for many UK manufacturing companies to win contracts. "If you can't tick the box in tender documentation, you're going to stop there," he says. Sustainability questions are increasingly being written into supplier checklists in the same way and are on track to becoming a need-to-have.
The transparency burden runs both ways along the supply chain. Every company's carbon footprint should include Scope 3 emissions, the emissions in its supply chain, which typically make up its largest share. This means it’s very difficult for a company to hit net zero unless its suppliers do too. It explains why large companies are pushing sustainability requirements onto their suppliers.
Greenwashing and poor data
Falling behind on sustainability data isn't just a reputational headache, it's a business risk. New regulations directly target unsupported environmental claims. As Raoul explains, "You can no longer make sustainable claims towards the consumer if you cannot prove them. You always need to show evidence." Stephen sees this dynamic playing out in the market more broadly. With far more sustainability professionals scrutinising this space than even a few years ago, companies that "bend the truth a little bit" for greenwashing purposes quickly get found out. The reputational damage that follows can be significant.
One of the biggest risk factors is poor data quality. Just as digital trust relies on accurate and reliable information, sustainability performance depends on the quality of the data behind it. Raoul flags supply chain data as one of the biggest challenges he sees in practice. Tier 1 suppliers often rely on generic industry-average data rather than their own actual figures. This poses increasing risks further down complex, multi-tier supply chains. Stephen makes a related point about the risk of comparing "apples with pears" within a single supply chain: if one company uses rigorously verified data and another has "cobbled some numbers together", together, they will fail to produce figures that can be meaningfully compared. This is a real problem for anyone trying to make a fair supplier or investment decision.
Building sustainability into everyday business
When it comes to helping companies adopt new sustainability systems, "Every company starts from a different place," says Raoul. "Some want to understand their carbon footprint. Others need to respond to customer requirements or prepare for new legislation. Our role is to help them build a roadmap that fits where they are today and where they want to be tomorrow. The goal isn't simply to achieve a certificate. It's to support organizations as they build systems that enable continual improvement."
Raoul highlights three broad areas across which almost every business now needs to build capability, regardless of their individual sustainability journey.
Sustainability metrics
Your organization needs reliable ways of measuring and reporting their environmental performance, including greenhouse gas emissions, carbon footprints and other sustainability indicators.
Sustainability Due diligence
Sustainability no longer stops at your organization's own operations. Your business is increasingly expected to understand environmental and social risks throughout your supply chain, which requires stronger governance and greater transparency from your suppliers.
Circular economy
Many organizations are redesigning products, services and processes to reduce waste, extend product lifecycles and use resources more efficiently. Demonstrating your progress in circularity is becoming an increasingly important part of sustainable business.
Global expertise, practical support
Although these three areas may seem different, they all have one thing in common: they require organizations to replace assumptions with evidence. That shift is exactly where independent assurance comes in. It is also where Kiwa, together with NQA, offers unique, comprehensive solutions.
NQA brings deep expertise in corporate carbon footprinting and net zero verification across the UK, the EU, US and China, while Kiwa adds extensive experience in product-level assessments, Environmental Product Declarations and Life Cycle Assessments. "There are lots of synergies in what Kiwa and NQA do," says Stephen, "and they're coming together into one." The result, as Raoul describes it, is "a solid, global strategy" backed by local experts who understand how requirements differ from one market to the next. For organizations operating internationally, that means a single partner that can coordinate assurance activities across countries while adapting to local regulations, business realities and customer requirements.
Accreditation is what makes all of this dependable. As Stephen puts it, "What sets us apart in a cluttered marketplace of accredited and unaccredited providers, is that NQA and Kiwa operate under recognized accreditation bodies.” He mentions UKAS in the UK and DAkkS in Germany, names that stand for a rigorous, independently assessed methodology behind every claim they help verify.
What about technology’s role in all of this? “Technology is becoming essential to making sustainability manageable at scale,” says Raoul. "Organizations can't improve what they can't measure. That's why Kiwa has developed R<think, a digital platform that helps organizations calculate environmental impacts through Life Cycle Assessments, Environmental Product Declarations and Corporate Carbon Footprints, bringing sustainability data calculation and verification together in one place. This makes it easier for organizations to manage evidence consistently, reduce duplication and prepare confidently for independent verification.”
The future of sustainable trust
It’s clear that sustainability will continue to evolve alongside changing regulation, accelerating technologies such as AI, and the transition to a net-zero economy. As reporting requirements become more sophisticated and organizations increasingly rely on digital tools and data to measure performance, stakeholders will expect sustainability claims to be more transparent, more traceable and more trustworthy than ever.
Independent assurance plays a central role on the journey toward a sustainable world. It gives organizations the evidence, credibility and confidence to demonstrate real progress, respond to changing expectations and build lasting trust through internationally recognized, independently verified assurance that supports continual improvement over time.
"Sustainability isn't a project with a finish line," Raoul reflects. “Regulation, expectations and organizational capability will keep evolving together, and the companies that build robust systems now will be far better placed for what comes next.”
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Who are Kiwa and NQA?
Kiwa is a global leader in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC), helping organizations build trust in products, services, processes and management systems across a wide range of industries. NQA began in the UK in 1988 as a certification body under the name of National Quality Assurance, then branched out internationally. It specializes in management systems certification and training, with expertise that spans information security, quality, environmental management and digital trust.
By joining forces, Kiwa and NQA have strengthened their international reach, with key hubs in the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands and China, operations in 25 countries, and the ability to serve customers in more than 100 countries through partners and agents. Together, they combine expertise built up across sectors including aerospace and defense, automotive, construction, manufacturing, information technology, food, healthcare and professional services.
