How many sustainability reports

Sean McCabe. Senior Editor, Accounting Today mailto linkedin. For reprint and licensing requests for this article, click here. Donor-advised funds increased their donations to charities last year in response to the COVID pandemic, hitting the biggest levels in over a decade. By Michael Cohn. You will not continue to receive KPMG subscriptions until you accept the changes. Close Hi! Our privacy policy has been updated since the last time you logged in.

We want to make sure you're kept up to date. Please take a moment to review these changes. You will not receive KPMG subscription messages until you agree to the new policy. Ignore and log out. However, a closer look at the evidence suggests that the impact of the measurement and reporting movement has been oversold.

During this same year period of increased reporting and sustainable investing, carbon emissions have continued to rise, and environmental damage has accelerated.

Social inequity, too, is increasing. For example, in the United States the gap between median CEO compensation and median worker pay has widened, even though public companies are now required to disclose that ratio. It turns out that reporting is not a proxy for progress. Measurement is often nonstandard, incomplete, imprecise, and misleading. Worse yet, the focus on reporting may actually be an obstacle to progress—consuming bandwidth, exaggerating gains, and distracting from the very real need for changes in mindsets, regulation, and corporate behavior.

I contributed to this failure as an enthusiastic member of Sustainability Inc. From to I worked at Timberland, a footwear and apparel company committed to marrying commerce with a philosophy of justice.

We took those commitments seriously. In addition, Timberland issued a corporate social responsibility report as early as , and in it started issuing such documents quarterly alongside its financial reports. We believed that measurement and transparency would increase competition within the industry to find sustainable solutions while engendering healthy pressure from investors and consumers. We even won a presidential award for corporate citizenship.

Moreover, reporting does not ensure environmental and social improvement—though people often conflate the two. Isamu Sawa. The limitations of sustainability reporting became apparent at Timberland too. And sometime after my departure, and after the company was sold to VF in , Timberland stopped labeling shoeboxes with Green Index scores because of the challenges in calculating them.

They are very likely rewarded with lower costs of capital as a result of being better managers of risk , and their focus on sustainability can improve margins and enhance brand value. That said, corporate sustainability efforts have not, in the aggregate, made much difference for society or the planet.

In addition, the reporting itself suffers from some very real problems. Most companies have complete discretion over what standard-setting body to follow and what information to include in their sustainability reports. As a result, a lot of the input data is misleading and incomplete.

By contrast, financial reporting follows agreed-upon standards, and compliance is ensured by a referee in the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission. Instead, most companies set goals based on their capabilities or aspirations. Science-based targets, along with corporate emissions allocations in keeping with the same, have become more common since that study was done, but at this stage they remain aspirational.

Decisions made to chase low-cost labor have led to highly distributed supply chains where the producers of goods are often located nowhere near the end users. In the industry I know best, footwear and apparel, supply chains have disappeared from view.

When I started working at Timberland, the overwhelming majority of our boots and shoes were produced in Timberland-owned factories, almost all located in the United States. Our factory workers were among our customers; social and environmental decisions had local impact. No more. And audits have failed to stem social and environmental abuses. Reporting is not a proxy for progress. Access the latest stories, press releases and features about sustainability reporting.

A model that supports our multi-stakeholder standard setting and independence. Current vacancies with GRI. Get in touch, or visit our offices. GRI has welcomed research that shows a record number of companies, spanning sectors and geographic regions, are voluntarily choosing to disclose their sustainability impacts — with the GRI Standards the most widely used for reporting.

Across all companies surveyed, the GRI Standards is the only sustainability reporting framework that can demonstrate widespread global adoption. The report highlights trends towards global consolidation of corporate reporting requirements, which GRI supports. Not only are their stakeholders demanding it, they realize that improved sustainability performance leads to more resilient and effective business practices.

This KPMG research indicates that most large and mid-sized companies are deciding that the GRI Standards provide the most effective way for them to disclose their sustainability impacts. By enabling reporting that is comprehensive and consistent, with widespread adoption, GRI offers a global common language for corporate transparency. While the continued growth in sustainability reporting is encouraging, more needs to be done to drive up the quality and depth of disclosure.

What is important is that companies apply the same rigor in communicating both sustainability and financial impacts. Standards Download the Standards. Standards development.

Sector Program. Global Sustainability Standards Board. How to use the GRI Standards. Resource center. Questions and answers. Global alignment. Register your report. Reporting support. Reporting support GRI Community.