Top takeaways: Preparing your EHS strategy for what’s ahead

In our recent webinar, Prepare your EHS strategy for what’s ahead, Enhesa experts explored the challenges businesses face when trying to stay on top of emerging regulations and how a forward-looking view of upcoming changes helps industry-leading companies reduce risk and gain a competitive advantage through continuous improvement. Based on their experiences helping businesses enhance their horizon-scanning with Enhesa’s Regulatory Forecaster, our experts also explained how industry leaders do it — and why it’s so beneficial to their long-term EHS initiatives. Achieving these benefits relies on defining and expanding your strategic horizons, moving away from reactive approaches to compliance, and centralizing knowledge in a single source of truth for forward-looking EHS trends.

Expand your horizon of strategic planning

Changing EHS regulations can have significant impacts on your business, and the pace of change is relentless. In fact, there were more than 70 new EHS requirements or major changes per day in 2024 — more than 30,000 in total throughout the year.

With this constant change, it can be easy to fall into the trap of responding to new regulation developments only when they come into force. But when operational planning doesn’t account for future regulatory developments, the consequences can be serious — ranging from expensive late-stage changes and operational disruptions to fines and legal liabilities, or even missed deadlines.

By getting visibility of regulatory changes earlier, EHS teams can ensure they have the time to plan, prepare, and adapt their EHS program strategically to changing regulations before they come into force. There are three key horizons to consider:

1. Understanding the regulations today: This is the baseline for any EHS professional. At this level, the organization is compliant with current requirements but vulnerable to change. Failure to spot new regulations in time can lead to operational disruption, unplanned expenses, reputational damage, and more.
2. Planning for upcoming changes: Getting a forward view of upcoming changes likely to impact the organization reduces the risk of missing key developments. This enables more proactive choices about priorities, team resources, and more — freeing up capacity and allowing EHS teams to focus on what’s important in both the short-term and the near-term.
3. Future-proofing for emerging trends: At this final stage of maturity, EHS teams are able to anticipate not just short-term changes but also long-term trends likely to impact their EHS management and compliance strategy. Insights into the drivers of change facilitate more strategic choices about investments, long-term planning, strategic growth into new global jurisdictions, and more — creating a competitive advantage for the organization and mitigating risks for capital investments.

Regulatory Forecaster is a forward-looking EHS solution that helps leading businesses worldwide expand their horizons of strategic planning by providing comprehensive coverage of emerging regulations across 400 jurisdictions, plus additional coverage of policy, guidance, jurisprudence, and more.

Transform from reactive compliance to EHS horizon scanning

As businesses expand their horizon of strategic planning, teams are empowered to make informed, proactive choices in an increasing number of areas, including:

• Taking immediate corrective action where a regulatory development might lead to non-compliance
• Prioritizing resources on the team and ensuring the most pressing issues are being addressed
• Securing budget for any changes that may be required as a result of upcoming regulatory change
• Planning your response to regulatory developments, instead of making disruptive last-minute changes
• Informing long-term capital investments to ensure they’re not incurring new risks for the business

In each case, Regulatory Forecaster provides detailed, actionable intelligence about upcoming EHS regulations throughout the entire policymaking and legislative process — from general policies to drafts of bills or proposals and public consultation, to the final adopted legislation. It also includes committee notes, details of significant jurisprudence, and other key information.

With this information, your business can make more informed choices and reduce the potential hazards of disruption from unexpected regulatory updates.

Centralize data about upcoming EHS regulations

EHS regulations impact a wide range of stakeholders across any organization. All of these stakeholders need to be informed of developments that might affect them, but all too often, silos make this communication a challenge. Regulatory Forecaster solves this problem by providing one single source of truth, all on an intuitive online platform.

We’ve found there are two main ways in which EHS data tends to be communicated across the organization, both of which work well with Regulatory Forecaster:

• A centralized approach, where the corporate EHS team briefs stakeholders on relevant information. Regulatory Forecaster was designed to make this easy, with quick summaries and breakdowns of both the key changes and the impacts on business. All this is delivered in a clear, plain-English format that even non-technical stakeholders will find simple to pick up and use.
• A decentralized approach where stakeholders ‘self-serve’ information from the portal. With Regulatory Forecaster, everyone can access the information they need — from corporate EHS teams to site-level teams, to other corporate functions like legal and HR. Plus, they can set up and share custom views and filters tailored to their role.

In short, Regulatory Forecaster can help keep stakeholders informed however they choose to work.

Learn more today — watch our free webinar

By giving you information on what’s coming into force, what’s coming soon, and what’s coming over the horizon, Regulatory Forecaster provides detailed insight into what’s happening across each compliance horizon. Its powerful collaboration features extend this insight to your entire organization.

This empowers users to take a strategic approach to compliance, planning around future EHS developments that might otherwise become an obstacle in the future, and reducing the risks of unexpected costs and operational disruptions.

We discuss these topics in even more detail in our latest webinar, Leveling up your EHS data, along with a live demonstration of Regulatory Forecaster, so you can see it for yourself.