Survey: Sustainability Report Readers Single-minded

Respondents call for combining financial, corporate responsibility publications

By Dennis Schaal

One report may be better than two.

The prospect of folding sustainability reports into annual financial reports was a tactic viewed highly by the vast majority of sustainability report readers in a new KPMG-SustainAbility survey, “Count me in: The readers’ take on sustainability reporting.”

The vast majority of the 1,827 sustainability report readers, who responded to the Oct. 1, 2007-Jan. 31, 2008, survey, “desire reports in the future to be integrated with annual financial reports,” according to the findings.

And, 12 percent of the respondents indicated that they would like to see companies publish sustainability reports more than once per year, the study said.

“We believe there can be real value in reporting companies’ considering and implementing aligned processes for sustainability reporting and financial reporting to meet readers’ needs,” the study said. “In practice, this can be difficult, given the highly regulated format of many annual financial reports, which can make a complex story such as sustainability even more challenging and less accessible.”

The survey, which also took the pulse of 452 nonreaders of sustainability reports, was a global one. The geographic breakdown of the 2279 survey participants was: Europe (47 percent); Latin America (28 percent); Asia Pacific (15 percent); North America (7 percent); and Africa/ Middle East (2 percent).

Among other findings:

• 85 percent of readers indicated that they had a more positive view of a company after reading its sustainability report;
• Almost 60 percent of readers stated that incorporating stakeholders’ critiques into sustainability reports demonstrated a firm’s commitment to sustainability;
• 90 percent of readers noted that adherence to reporting standards, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Guidelines, build trust and improve reports;
• A majority of the readers stated that assurance is important for sustainability performance and reporting, although opinion was divided somewhat on whether stakeholders or assurance providers were the most appropriate vehicle for verifying sustainability efforts.

The release of the KPMG-SustainAbility survey came in conjunction with the GRI’s Amsterdam Global Conference on Sustainability and Transparency May 7-9.

In other news, the Center for Sustainable Innovation (CSI) announced it intends to conduct a Social Footprint Masterclass in Burlington, Vt., May 28-30.

CSI believes that its Social Footprint Method (SFM) plugs a gap in GRI Guidelines. “While GRI does, in fact, advocate for the inclusion of sustainability context in related reports, it nevertheless fails to provide guidance for how to do so, and its metrics exclude it,” CSI stated.

SFM measures environmental impacts “against actual conditions in the world, much like an income statement measures revenues against costs,” CSI stated.