The Evolution of Business Reporting: Make Room for Sustainability Disclosure

摘要

Financial reporting and sustainability reporting are often assumed to be distant cousins without much in common. The latter has only recently been formalized with the advent of the Global Reporting Initiative's (GRI's) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines, whereas the former has been evolving steadily over the past 100 years. Hundreds of companies worldwide produce sustainability reports, but very few combine these disclosures with their financial data. As a result, investors are making decisions based on incomplete information because they lack disclosures on how sustainability enhances value creation. What is needed is a new approach to business reporting that maintains traditional financial information (driven by accounting standards) and supplements it with information from sustainability reporting.