GRI Reporting Makes Headway in the U.S.

Originally posted on Conference Board.
February 25, 2015

March 2, 2015 /3BL Media/ - Even though the overall environmental and social disclosure rate among global companies has remained essentially unchanged over the last year, reporting using the framework introduced by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) continued its rise in the United States, and one out of three large U.S. companies now adopt those guidelines. Exceptional progress has also been made in the transparency of individual practices, such as anti-bribery and climate change. Specifically, 60 percent of companies reported having an anti-bribery ethics policy, an increase of 21 percentage points over last year. Similarly, 19 percent of companies (up from the 9 percent recorded last year) included climate change risk disclosure in their most recent annual reports.

So reports The Conference Board Sustainability Practices Dashboard 2015, a comprehensive database and online benchmarking tool that captures the most recent disclosure of environmental and social practices by large public companies around the world and segments them by market index, geography, sector, and revenue group. Sustainability Practices covers a total of 79 environmental and social practices, ranging from greenhouse gas emissions to water consumption and from labor standards to political contributions. It is the result of the collaboration between The Conference Board, Bloomberg, and GRI.

Sustainability Practices was inaugurated as a publication in July 2012 and became a web-based application in 2013, in response to growing demand from company directors, investors, financial analysts, and other stakeholders for comparative data in the sustainability field. With the dashboard, users can view individual sustainability practices by segments and generate customized charts.

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