Environmental Sustainability relates to:
- The impact of operations and products on the environment (energy/paper/water use and waste)
- The potential for savings in operations, or as a result of providing low-impact products
The objective of sustainability reporting is to review the challenges and opportunities companies face regarding their social and ecological environment and how successfully they have been able to evade or capitalize on these environmental trends.
WWF would like to see companies report on measurable, and verifiable improvements in their sustainability; and to set ambitious targets in line with a fair contribution by the relevant sector, to the global effort to curb environmental degradation – in particular climate change – in line with the requirements of science.
We recommend using global standards and supporting progressive voluntary disclosure initiatives for reporting, including the Global Reporting Initiative (G3) and the Carbon Disclosure Project.
It is also useful to benchmark specific sustainability performance indicators against peers/competitors or the sector on average, nationally or internationally; and to trend performance over time.
A further area of corporate responsibility relates to lobbying and advocacy: does the company engage government to improve standards and policies relating to sustainability?
The board should be accountable for corporate sustainability and reporting should be at least annual. Ideally sustainability costing should be integrated into “triple bottom-line” accounting as part of mainstreaming sustainability into decision-making throughout the organization. The reality is that impacts like energy and water use are already (and increasingly) material to the financial bottom-line, while greenhouse gas impacts are increasingly being priced in through taxes (in SA) or rationing (in most OECD countries) and potentially for import tariffs.
WWF would like to see companies report on measurable, and verifiable improvements in their sustainability; and to set ambitious targets in line with a fair contribution by the relevant sector, to the global effort to curb environmental degradation – in particular climate change – in line with the requirements of science.
We recommend using global standards and supporting progressive voluntary disclosure initiatives for reporting, including the Global Reporting Initiative (G3) and the Carbon Disclosure Project.
It is also useful to benchmark specific sustainability performance indicators against peers/competitors or the sector on average, nationally or internationally; and to trend performance over time.
A further area of corporate responsibility relates to lobbying and advocacy: does the company engage government to improve standards and policies relating to sustainability?
The board should be accountable for corporate sustainability and reporting should be at least annual. Ideally sustainability costing should be integrated into “triple bottom-line” accounting as part of mainstreaming sustainability into decision-making throughout the organization. The reality is that impacts like energy and water use are already (and increasingly) material to the financial bottom-line, while greenhouse gas impacts are increasingly being priced in through taxes (in SA) or rationing (in most OECD countries) and potentially for import tariffs.