New CSR Insight Report Is Guide to Sustainability Trends, Metrics and Regulation
If you’re curious about what’s new regarding sustainability reporting, sustainability investments and sustainability regulation, I suggest you spend a few minutes with the newly released CSR Insight Report, available at www.csr-insight.com (registration required).
The 93-page report gives a comprehensive overview of the field, including perspective on a variety of fundamental factors, including:
- sustainability performance and reporting trends,
- sustainable and responsible investment (SRI) philosophy and strategies,
- key drivers of sustainability and sustainability reporting, and
- sustainability metrics –methodology, monitoring, and verification.
In addition, about one-third of the document is devoted to a detailed discussion about U.S. securities laws, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the general characteristics of SEC disclosure requirements.
Your company needs to be considering all of these aspects of sustainability, and I highly recommend this report as way to either get the conversation started or fine-tune plans you already have underway.
After all, as the report states so succinctly:
A new breed of business leaders has emerged and is redrawing the global playing field around a new set of competitive advantages and relationships with customers, employees, and other stakeholders, developing creative and commercially viable solutions for addressing our daunting and urgent global challenges. The“Sustainable Enterprise” has become the new baseline and a clear business imperative.
Hello
Our firm is deeply engaged in sustainable packaging and packaging strategy within the context of multi-national supply chains for the consumer electronics industry. While I find the report thought provoking, it seemed to lack reference to the critical issues we are facing globally regarding the disparity of processes and methodologies for LCA (life cycle assessments). I believe LCA data is the molecular level component of this organism we call CSR. We find quite often that there are entire regions of the world where good data is lacking, making it incredibly difficult for some of the world’s largest corporations to baseline their environmental impact and give an accurate and consistent depiction of their global supply chain footprint.
For example, the EPA’s E-Grid database gives us clear information regarding the GHG impact of a MWH of electricity consumed at a warehouse in Denver vs Detroit. However, when you try to do the same impact analysis in Delhi or Durban you are quite challenged. Parley this into the lack of data out there for petroleum refining, plastics extrusion and injection molding and it’s clear why a cell phone manufacturer can’t tell the e-waste partner what the impact is of recycling of refurbishing their device is.
I know the purpose of the report is not to get into LCA granularity, but I would have preferred to see a reference to this critical component. It is a serious issue that has plagued myself and others on the ground trying to support our clients’ reporting goals and objectives. It would be great if future reports could broach this subject.
Regards
Sean Sabre
1Manager Global Supply Chain Development
ModusLink Global Solutions