Does Sustainability Reporting Improve Corporate Behaviour?: Wrong Question? Right Time?

This report examines the new world of sustainability reporting, and the complex web of stakeholders. It focuses particularly on the demands for new kinds of transparency which serve the interests of the environment and society.

Melting glaciers, depleting water resources and decreasing air quality needs immediate attention. Everyone needs air and water to survive. Business started practicing sustainable accounting in mid-70. This practice discloses non-financial and financial information related to the business activities that has direct impact on society and its environment (air, water, people etc.). Companies use triple bottom line method to calculate the impact of business activities on society and based on these calculation companies makes policies which make its operation more ecologically and socially

Table of Contents Introduction............................................................................................................................ 2 I. The development of global, European and national policies relating to sustainability. 2 1. Changing attitudes of public, politicians and businesses to the environment since 1945 .................................................................................................................................... 2 2. Brundtland definition of ‘sustainable development’ .................................................. 4 3. The international and UK policies to sustainable development since Earth Summit of 1992

This report provides an analysis and evaluation of Sustainability Report for financial year (FY) 2013 of three Australian leading list energy companies: Santos, AGL and Origin. These three firms will be taken into the comparison by analyzing four different aspects of how they disclose in their Sustainability Report.

Topic: How social and environmental reporting practices undertaken by companies highlight the limitations of the conceptual framework.

Organisations such as the Global Reporting Initiative and AccountAbility have embraced and promoted the 3BL concept for use in the corporate world. And corporations are listening. Companies as significant as AT&T, Dow Chemical, Shell, and British Telecom, have used 3BL terminology in their press releases, annual reports and other documents. So have scores of smaller firms. Not surprisingly, most of the big accounting firms are now using the concept approvingly and offering services to help firms that want to measure, report or audit their two additional "bottom lines." Similarly, there is now a sizable portion of the investment industry devoted to screening companies on the basis of their social and environmental performance, and many of these explicitly use the language of 3BL.^ Governments, government departments and political parties (especially Green parties) are also well represented in the growing documentation of those advocating or accepting 3BL "principles." For many NGOs and activist organisations 3BL seems to be pretty much an article of faith. Given the rapid uptake by corporations, governments, and activist groups, the paucity of academic analysis is both surprising and worrisome. Our recent search of the principal academic databases turned up only about a dozen articles, mostly concentrated in journals catering to the intersection of management and environmentalism. One book beyond Elkington 's has been

As requested, we has prepared an economic Study Report of David Jones analysing this company business operations and evaluating how their long-run business viability may be affected by the sustainability practice they adopt in their business operations.

‘Corporate social responsibility (CSR), broadly defined as the notion that companies should accompany the pursuit of profit with good citizenship within a wider society, has become an increasingly prominent feature of business life over the last 10 to 15 years’ (Sadler and Lloyd, 2009:613). This quote from Sadler and Lloyd is a useful starting point in demonstrating the rapid rise and development of corporate responsibility. Global issues, in an economic sense with the global financial crisis in 2008 and in an environmental sense with the threat of climate change have aided in bringing to the fore a need for businesses and the corporate world to manage themselves and the services they offer in a more responsible and sustainable way. In particular reference to the financial sector this has attempted to be achieved through global financial sustainability agreements such as the Equator Principles. By entering into global agreements careful monitoring and reporting of a banks activities is required to create transparency in assessing their contributions towards corporate social responsibility and the achievement of sustainable practices in the financial sector. One of the banks currently signed up to the Equator principles is Barclays, as one of the largest global banks in the world with a 300 year history it is a company that serves 48 million customers worldwide

It is an organization’s goal to maximize shareholders’ wealth. At the most basic level, every organization has an economic responsibility to make a profit so that they can provide a return to their owners and investors, create employment and keep the economy flowing through contribution of goods and services. However, an organization must be also able to understand the importance of human and natural resources in the environment. Resources from the environment are not unlimited and its misuse can damage ecology and in turn, affect a company’s ability to achieve profit potential. The community is also another important factor because an organization’s customers are ultimately people in society and the well being of these individuals are

The trend is now in favour of environmental management and support for climate change control. The industry practice will vary in degree of environmental impact, and the implications as such will affect the material disclosure of each company’s report, tailored to each sector. Investors are looking for three things: track record of incidents (penalties for non-compliance, environmental provisions, licensing issues, accredited ISO 14001 standards), policies and reforms, and solid data on (any) waste productivity, consumption levels of energy & resources, or CO2 emissions (FSC 2015).

110). Increasing amounts of social accounting is leading to concepts like CSR and SEA becoming an integral part of the profitability of a business. With this increase, Brown and Fraser (2006) indicate that these initiatives can be viewed as ideological weapons, but corporations are also susceptible to “the corporate strategy of weakening national and international environmental agreements while promoting voluntary measures” (Brown and Fraser, 2006, p. 111). This is known as deep greenwash, and those who follow this strategy are doing so strictly for business reasons. The goal is to attain some type of benefits that are only available through social accounting. Based on the three approaches, it is evident that CSR is a critical factor for businesses to consider if profitability is desired.

Transparency report has become mandatory in Australia and United Kingdom regulated by the Depeartment for Environment Food & Rural Affairs (2013). This has catalyses many corporation, such as Facebook and Google, to produce an environmental report that includes waste management, greenhouse and carbon emmission and many other indicators. Global Reporting Initiative has produced a reporting framework that is widely used today.

Undoubtedly, the environment is experiencing unprecedented economic problems, social unrest and environmental disasters. All these issues may bring harm to the business and all the human being involves as these three factors are correlated. Therefore, people and businesses are becoming more aware of the importance of going beyond financial performance, and have a shift toward the account of businesses’ impacts on the society and environment. The motives that drive companies to undertake TBL reporting can be explained by the seven drivers which lead to a closely linked revolutions are markets, values, transparency, life cycle technology, life cycle technology, partners, time and corporate governance.

Information technology has undoubtedly become an indispensable part of our day to day lives. Both the articles considered for analysis projects the role of IT, from being the back-bone of commerce to handling huge volumes of data, as being highly significant in the modern world. Even though both Nicholas Carr and Erik Brynjolfsson are in agreement to the omnipresence of IT, their perception of the future of IT differs vastly. I am in accordance with the school of thought put forth by Nicholas Carr which believes that the strategic value of IT has reduced. For all the inventions that had revolutionized the world there has been a point where these inventions become inevitable and hence

During a lecture in International Sustainable Tourism, we discussed the Triple Bottom Line or Triple Bottom Line Reporting, which means expanding the traditional reporting framework to take into account environmental and social performance in addition to financial performance. This framework is becoming an accepted approach for organizations to demonstrate they have strategies for Sustainable Growth. It focuses on decision-making and reporting, which explicitly considers an organization’s economic, environmental and social performance. Triple Bottom Line focuses on Stakeholders instead of Shareholders. A Stakeholder is a person, group, or organization who has an interest or concern in an organization. In this essay, I