Sustainability Terminology: Reporting Tools

(down-tempo music) <v ->The third group that has a lot of commonly</v> used terminology are the reporting tools. If you are involved in the environmental, social and governance space or ESG space, especially in larger organizations, you will have seen more and more requests to report on one or all aspects of SDG related performance in one or more different frameworks. Unfortunately, currently there are still many different reporting standards which have varied acceptance across industries and countries. This can mean that as one organization you will have to duplicate or triplicate your reporting to satisfy all different stakeholders. The good news is that there is currently a European initiative to streamline main reporting frameworks, which should result, hopefully, in one commonly accepted standard.

The International Integrated Reporting Council, IIRC, which is the organization that have produced the integrated reporting or IIR framework and the sustainability accounting standards board, have already announced that they will merge into one sustainability reporting organization. The Value Reporting Foundation. The integrated reporting framework is a driving force for more integrated thinking and has introduced a concept known as the six capitals. It requires businesses to look at and report on their business models from an input and output perspective, beyond just a financial capital. To the other important capital’s that businesses receive input from and have an impact on, both positive and negative. These are intellectual, manufactured, natural, human and social capital. Some of the other important frameworks are GRI.

The Global Reporting Initiative, a set of standards that apply to balance sustainability reporting. TCFD, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, which was first released in 2017, to promote more informed investment credits and insurance underwriting decisions. It is currently rapidly being adopted as highly recommended or mandatory for any business that are registered on stock exchanges like London, Johannesburg and New Zealand. IRIS, is a free publicly available resource that is managed by the Global Impact Investing Network, or GIN, the global champion of impact investing, and they provide reporting standards focused mainly on impact investors.

As mentioned before under the business management tools, I’d like to point out one particular business performance tool that is also a reporting tool and define societal requirements in plain language. The Future Fit Business Benchmark. The Future Fit Business Benchmark, is based on 30 plus years of scientific research and gives a business a clear destination towards becoming a future fit business, with clearly defined goals and objective measurements across every aspect of business performance. The ultimate aim of the not-for-profit future fit foundation, is to create a future fit society. One that is environmentally regenerative, economically inclusive and socially just.

I encourage you to spend some time having a look around the future fit business.org website to get a better understanding of SDGs, as well as some of the other terminology. We realize we may have overwhelmed you with a lot of information, so to embed some of the learning, we will now challenge you to do a quiz. See how you go? And if you want to know more terminology, here is a really good overview of many more terms. Look at the article below here. (upbeat music)