Sustainability Reporting

UNEP DTIE has for many years worked to stimulate individual companies - and industry associations through their membership - to report on their sustainability performance and the implementation of their voluntary commitments in the form of codes of conduct and charters. One key obstacle in advancing sustainability reporting in the 1990s was the absence of a generally accepted reporting framework, which would greatly enhance the credibility, comparability and comprehensiveness of corporate sustainability reports. Since 1994, UNEP and the London-based SustainAbility Ltd have produced various reports on corporate sustainability reporting through its joint Engaging Stakeholders Programme. This programme is designed to meet the ever-increasing demand for the benchmarking of corporate sustainability reports, and the further analysis of sustainability reporting at the sector-level. Sustainability reporting activity in recent years has also included the publication of the first sustainability reports by public authorities. This has been accompanied by a debate on the role of government in advancing sustainability reporting, including exploration of the pros and cons of voluntary and mandatory approaches to reporting. UNEP DTIE has initiated its own efforts to promote reporting in the UN system and to facilitate debate on different policy approaches. We provide special assistance to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through The Efficient Entrepreneur calendar. On the basis of "You can't manage what you can't measure", the calendar introduces environmental performance measures through a month-by-month programme that ends with a simple SME environmental report.

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Contributor: Anuradha Bhattacharjee
Published Date: April 24, 2008