Sustainability Reports: Who Reads them, and Why?
An open question to our readers: do you read annual sustainability reports?
Well, it turns out that the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) were curious as well. So, they went ahead and hired a few consulting companies (SustainAbility and KPMG) to go ahead and survey sustainability report readers.
While some of the responses were not all that surprising, the survey’s results did speak to the trends within the reporting industry.
SustainAbility Chairperson Sophia Tickell discussed the strategic use of sustainability reports.
Reporting was once a way to get sustainability issues onto the corporate agenda. Today the situation is reversing as a growing number of companies make ambitious commitments to sustainability. There is much business as usual but these targets matter because what gets measured gets done and — hopefully — reported against. This shift in where the agenda is set holds real potential to influence products and services — and eventually to shape business models of the future.
Reporting will be important but will need, explicitly, to make clearer links between sustainability issues and core business strategy — something that all stakeholders (including the mainstream investment community) seem to agree upon.
