Global Reporting Initiative

Socially responsible investment and its impact to your company

20th Jul 2009 by Richard Gunawan

Companies that fail to disclose their ESG performance will find it more difficult to obtain funds from institutional investors. Several pension funds, for example, consider climate change a key criterion and will exclude companies that cannot substantiate their environmental commitments.

The absence of a proper management system, policy and review will deter fund managers. Investors are more savvy in their selection of companies that prove a genuine commitment to sustainability issues.

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Amsterdam Declaration ties Economic Downturn to lack of CSR Transparency

12th Mar 2009 by Alex Briggs

Global leaders from business, labor and civil society today declared their belief that the lack of transparency in the existing system for corporate reporting has failed its stakeholders. In issuing The Amsterdam Declaration on Transparency and Reporting, Board Members of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) called on governments to introduce policies requiring companies to address publicly environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors.

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World’s best CSR companies? Think again

29th Oct 2008 by Alex Briggs

This Salter-Baxter report on the world’s leading CSR reporting companies has led to increasing debate. With companies such as British-American Tobacco, Nestle and Shell at the top of the rankings, controversy is the order of the day.

Sir Jonathon Porritt, the chairman of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, and founder of Forum for the Future, led the attack on the report,

When any company is systematically mispricing risks and systematically misallocating capital it makes no sense to talk about corporate responsibility. We’re going to have to face the fact some of the measures used to judge relative CSR performance are useless. They don’t help shareholders. They don’t help citizens. They don’t help the companies themselves.

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Restoring Trust in CSR

26th Sep 2008 by Alex Briggs

This video interview with Alan Knight offers insight into the new AA1000AS standard. The standard will be launched in London on the 24th of October.

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$300m IBM Investment in Business Continuity and Resiliency Services via 13 Global Data Centres in 10 Countries

26th Sep 2008

IBM has spotted an opportunity to fulfil growing global demand from businesses and governments to avoid, prepare and recover operations from disruption.

This is the biggest investment IBM has yet made in this area, according to Brian Reagan, who directs the company’s global strategy and portfolio management group.
IBM provides data storage on as-needed basis. In the event of a service disruption, the company said its datacentres would be able to electronically process the shift in information from customer sites in order to restore service in a reasonable amount of time.

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Are Standards helping or hurting workers rights?

17th Sep 2008 by Alex Briggs

Two workers rights experts have held an insightful debate into Supply Chain standards and human rights for workers. Jeff Ballinger, academic, former union and NGO activist is clearly against standards as the end all solution for factory abuses, while Doug Cahn, consultant and formerly of Reebok, is in favour of standards and audits in bringing about change in supply chain factories around the globe.
This Ethical Corporation article features the full debate.

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The 3 M’s in CSR reporting

11th Jul 2008

The 3 Keys To CSR Reporting Are Materiality, Materiality And Materiality by Alex Hausman, CSR Reporting Manager, The Timberland Company.

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