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What Is It? p.2
Structure
of a Sustainability Report (Page
2 of 2)
Begin by thinking of the Annual Report to Shareholders from a publicly-owned company. A published Sustainability Report works on the same principles, but on a wider context, giving equal weighting to environmental and social factors as it would to economic. The structure of the report is similar. The following description of the report reflects GRI guidelines:
• Company Profile/Statement of Intent: This is really the equivalent of the President or CEO's Statement declaring the "state of the nation" and what commitments the organization is planning on making with the reasoning behind it.
• Vision and Strategy: This area will provide a context to the three types of measures, providing an overview of the value adding activites of the company.
Each of the following sections will discuss initiatives that address specific concerns and how they are being monitored, progress achieved and the trade-offs being made.
• Economic Measures: These include the financial inputs and outputs and subsidies, breakdowns by business area, geography, how well managed the collections are, how well the organization manages to negotiate purchasing, and profitability.
• Environmental Measures: This section includes material inputs and outputs, energy and waste management, impact of substances used and processes employed, logistics, compliance with regulations and reduction, re-use and re-cycling policies.
• Social Measures: This section includes employee management to ensure fair treatment, compensation and employment policy, health and safety initiatives, investment in staff, human rights policy exerted on partners, contributions in money and kind to communities where the organization operates, socio-political influences and compliance with regulations.
Each of these sets of measures demonstrates the health of the organization and its exposure to particular types of risk.
• Metrics with year-on-year comparisons: Like a financial report, this section includes actual and normalized values (expressed in comparable measures or ratios) with year-on-year comparisons, where possible. Generally presented in tabular form with footnotes that link to exceptions.
(charts taken from CERES 2001 Sustainability Report to show normalized measures)
• Exceptions: This section will provide reasons where items are not normalized or even reported on. It also includes explanations of specific measures where a simple numeric indicator does not tell the whole story. For example, a business that rented commercial office and retail property was tracking energy emissions of its facilities. When it disposed of its retail and warehouse properties there was a large reduction in total square footage and because office properties have high emissions (due to air conditioning requirements), the overall energy emissions per square foot increased considerably. This change was necessary for the economic sustainability of the business and therefore requires certain clarifications.
There are alternative reporting formats and delivery methods depending on the business and communication objectives. These include:
• Operational and Financial Review (OFR) - established as a mandatory reporting format in the UK from January 2005 for all companies traded on the Financial Times Stock Exchange. As yet, no strict guidelines for reporting exist, other than the requirement to report with more specific requirements in the pipeline as companies enable themselves with this initiative.
• Environmental, Health & Safety Reports are a long standing requirement for many companies and in many cases they have significant overlap with many aspects of sustainability reporting.
• Websites and reports published for Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) funds that track specific measures that the fund managers focus on. An organization that is being tracked by multiple SRI funds will use such a report to consolidate handling the individual enquiries from different fund analysts resulting in a very tangible saving in administration costs and being able to be proactive in addressing fund manager's questions.