News

Tomorrow’s Value, SustainAbility’s fourth international benchmark of corporate sustainability reporting, has once again been developed in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Standard & Poor’s. This year we introduce a revised methodology, developed in close consultation with experts and leading corporate reporters, and – in line with our sense that the focus also needs to shift beyond disclosure and reporting to communication – we have adopted a portfolio approach. Tomorrow’s Value is the flagship document in a suite of publications exploring wider aspects of reporting, including communication with financial analysts and the wider innovation agenda. ... lees meer

Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, Inc., the global leader in analyzing extra-financial sources of investment risk, has released its most recent report on the Global Integrated Oil & Gas Sector. Of the 28 companies in the report, top sustainability performers with AAA ratings included Royal Dutch Shell, Norsk Hydro ASA, BP Plc, and Suncor Energy. Laggards included the Russian company Surgutneftegaz, and Petrochina. ... lees meer

About one in every ten dollars of assets under management in the U.S. – an estimated $2.3 trillion out of $24 trillion – is being invested in companies that rate highly on some measure of social responsibility. That’s a $2.3 trillion wager that socially responsible companies will outperform companies that don’t engage a wide array of stakeholders, from shareholders and customers to employees and activists, in an ongoing conversation about what can be done better. Which is why Fortune, for the second year in a row, is ranking the world’s largest companies according to how well they conform to socially responsible business practices. ... lees meer

Companies and organisations will get a new and simpler “score card” to measure their social and environmental impact when the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) kicks off a major conference this week. ... lees meer

The view that corporate social responsibility and profits are mutually exclusive objectives is challenged in a recently released paper, Corporate social responsibility: concepts, approaches to regulation and public sector application of the GRI, by John Purcell, technical adviser at CPA Australia, and Janice Loftus from the University of Sydney. ... lees meer

It is now nearly 20 years since “sustainable development” was defined by the Brundtland Commission as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” While not exactly new at the time, this event, and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development several years later, in 1992, are commonly regarded as the birth of the modern sustainability movement. ... lees meer

Shell announced initiatives it has adopted for mitigating climate change and promoting learning and education in the region, at the third Middle East Corporate Social Responsibility Summit. ... lees meer

Europe’s social affairs commissioner and a British environmental leader clashed Friday over whether the European Union is succeeding in its push for more social and ecological accountability among big corporations. The exchange at a Prague conference for lawyers, business and public officials underscored a widening gap between defenders and critics of the “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) system launched in 2000 at the EU’s Lisbon summit. ... lees meer

Ethical principles are driving sales, but marketers are being left on the shelf when it comes to decisions about social responsibility. Successful brands were once built around meeting a consumer need with the right product, at the right price and of the right quality. Today, the marketing agenda has been hijacked by a much more difficult to define, but impossible to ignore, beast: corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR should be an intrinsic part of modern brand management, which means marketing and CSR departments need to work together. But for many marketers, ethics may as well be a foreign language and in most companies, the marketing and CSR departments sit on opposite sides of business with little, if any, communication between them. ... lees meer