Elements of Operational Sustainability Management (formerly ESG Management)

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  • Updated March 12, 2026
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    Summary of Elements of Operational Sustainability Management (formerly ESG Management)

    The Operational Sustainability Management application supports organizations in managing sustainability initiatives by focusing on key elements such as material topics, goals, targets, emission activities, and disclosures. Understanding these components is essential for effective program implementation.

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    Key Features

    • Material Topics: These represent an organization’s significant impacts on the economy, environment, and society, identified through materiality assessments. Examples include E-waste management and community volunteering.
    • Goals: Objectives linked to material topics, such as achieving 50% workplace diversity by 2035. Goals can include subgoals and be associated with various entities for accountability.
    • Targets: Specific metrics to measure progress towards goals, like hiring a diverse workforce by a set percentage within a timeline.
    • Disclosures: Public reports detailing an organization’s sustainability performance.
    • Emission Activities and Factors: Activities that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, quantified using emission factors, which convert activity data into GHG emissions estimates.

    Key Outcomes

    By leveraging the Operational Sustainability Management application, organizations can effectively set and track sustainability goals, measure their progress through targeted metrics, and report on their performance in a transparent manner. Integrations with other ServiceNow products like Project Portfolio Management and Integrated Risk Management can enhance governance and accountability in achieving sustainability objectives.

    Before you start your sustainability initiatives, familiarize yourself with the key elements such as material topics, metrics, and disclosures that make up the Operational Sustainability Management application.

    The key components of the operational sustainability program are as follows:
    • Material topics: Themes that you want to work on.
    • Goals: Objectives that you want to reach based on your topics.
    • Targets: Set targets to track and measure the progress of the goals.
    • Emission activities and factors: Activities that lead to emissions.
    • Disclosures: Reports generated to show the company's progress on the chosen material topic.

    Material topics

    Material topics are topics that represent an organization's most significant impacts on the economy, environment, and people. Companies identify these material topics by performing materiality assessments. These topics reflect the organization’s most significant impacts on the society, environment, and people, including impacts on human rights. Some examples of material topics are E-waste management, giving and volunteering, and so on. To learn about the states of the material topic, refer to Material topic workflow and states.

    Goals

    Goals refer to objectives that an organization sets for itself to make an impact on their chosen material topics. You can link goals to material topics. Some examples of goals are as follows:
    • Using renewable energy by the end of the year 2035.
    • Increase diversity in the workplace by 50 percent.

    A goal can also have subgoals. You can also associate different entities to the goal so that you can track who is responsible for fulfilling the goal.

    If you integrate Operational Sustainability Management with other products, you can also do the following:
    • If you integrate with Project Portfolio Management, you can add programs and projects to capture the work being done to meet your goal.
    • If you integrate with Integrated Risk Management, you can add risks, risk statements, policies, control objectives, and issues to your goals and build a governance framework.

    For more information on integrations, see Integrating Operational Sustainability Management (formerly ESG) with other applications.

    Targets

    Targets help you to measure your goal. For example, to meet the goal of increasing diversity in the workplace by 50 percent, the target can be to hire 30 percent diverse workforce by the first quarter of 2035.

    Disclosures

    An operational sustainability disclosure is a form of public reporting by an organization about its performance across various sustainability issues.

    Emission activities and factors

    An emission activity refers to any activity that is associated with the release of pollutants such as Greenhouse gases (GHG).

    The release of GHG into the atmosphere depends mainly on the activity and the product that emits the gases. To estimate GHG emissions per unit of available activity, you must use a factor called an emission factor. An emission factor is a coefficient which allows to convert activity data into GHG emissions. It is the average emission rate of a given source, relative to units of an activity or processes. As an ESG program manager, you must set up your library of emission activities and factors.