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The APEsphere blog by Andrew and Angela Newton
NEWSWIRE
By Andrew Newton on 25 Mar, 2009 - 10:04 UTC

A new proprietary standard for reporting corporate sustainability performance claims to make sustainability reports simpler and contextual.

 

The non-profit Center for Sustainable Innovation (CSI) has entered what has been a narrowing field of standard setting for corporate responsibility reporting with the launch of its True Sustainability Index(TM) (TSI).

 

Whereas there is much emphasis in other reporting standards on tracking trend data and internal efficiencies, the TSI claims to focus on a company's performance relative to the actual resources available. Performing better than last year or than peers is all very well, the rationale goes, unless the contextual information about resource availability suggests that resource use is clearly unsustainable.

 

CSI's Executive Director, Mark W. McElroy, argues that "Whereas GRI has long advocated for the inclusion of context in non-financial reporting, we have finally found a way to do it, and at the same time have reduced GRI-type reporting from 150 metrics to 15!"

Business Green looks at the role of stakeholder engagement, third party verification and standards in strengthening corporate responsibility reporting.

 

British American Tobacco, SAP, ITC, Skanska AB, AccountAbility, GRI and Tetra Pak all get mentioned.

The business, labor and civil society board members of the Global Reporting Initiative have called on governments to compel business transparency.

The so-called Amsterdam Declaration issued today states the signatories' belief that the financial crisis would not have occurred had businesses been required to report comprehensively on their environmental, social and governance risks.

The declaration goes on to call on governments to require business - including their state-owned businesses - to report on all these risks, and to Integrate sustainability reporting requirements within the emerging global financial regulatory framework being developed by leaders of the G20.
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Another groundbreaking revision of the South African corporate governance code has been produced by the committee run by Mervyn King.

The second King report attracted international attention for its requirement that companies produce sustainability reports in line with recognised benchmarks such as the Global Reporting Initiative.

The new report takes the corporate responsibility agenda even further. It is no longer good enough simply to report on sustainability performance. Now sustainability is pushed as a principle so central to business operation that the report refers throughout to "integrated sustainability performance and reporting" i.e. the integration of sustainability into decision making and the annual report to shareholders.

The draft King 3 places South Africa back in the forefront of 21st century business thinking.
With most of the World's attention in the field of CSR focussing on the consumers of the US, the factories in China and the logging in South-East Asia, what about our cousins in Eastern Europe? How is CSR progressing in countries where "Social Policies" conjure up images of a not too distant past.

I interview Bruce Gahir, founder of the CSR Working Group and MBA professor in the Czech Republic, to find out where he thinks the practical future of CSR lies in this country.

Some excerpts:

"CSR is the Czech Republic has often taken the form of different people doing their own thing"

"We need more implementation, active follow up and feedback. "

"Today, only Czech Coal has been using some of the GRI’s reporting frameworks but they were using this before the translation."
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