Introduction
The Sustainability Reporting Program has completed a review of current approaches to sustainability reporting by business and industry. Our findings are based on reports from 20 companies that evaluate progress from the perspective of sustainability or environment, health and safety.
Current reporting trends have been identified and give a good indication of how "corporate sustainability" is understood by the business sector.
This report:
All of the reports reviewed cover environmental performance; some also give information on economic performance as well as contributions to community and social well-being. However, none of them links all three dimensions and only a few mention a relationship between environmental and economic activities. Examples of best practice have been collected.
Our Approach
The selected corporations have headquarters in North America, Europe or Australia
although most also operate in developing regions. Sectors represented include aerospace and defense, automotive and transportation, bio-industries, chemicals and plastics, consumer products, forestry and building products, health, metals and minerals processing, petrochemicals and power generation. A number conduct business in more than one sector.
The reports were evaluated according to the following framework :
No company is currently producing a true sustainability report, although several use a sustainability reporting framework. A sustainability report differs from an environmental report or an environmental, health and safety (EHS) report. It presents a holistic picture of company activities and provides a balanced view of benefits and trade-offs among social, economic and environmental impacts.
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The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro popularized the phrase sustainable development even as the definition of the term remained vague. The many definitions and frameworks that now exist share a number of basic principles including:
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