Sustainability reporting has until now largely been an activity limited to big and well-resourced organisations that have reputations to protect. But as public expectations for corporate transparency grow in an increasingly connected world, all companies will eventually be drawn in to communicate on their efforts toward sustainability. Through perceived inaction on climate and environment, more will find that competitiveness and corporate reputation are all too easy to lose.
The established sustainability reporting model sees larger companies report of their own volition on their efforts towards sustainability. They select those of their activities and impacts on which they will report. They then park this as a one-way blast in a pdf on their web site. They offer no dialogue or possibility of comeback to their audience. This model’s time is now up and its one-sided nature will come to be seen as unreliable and irrelevant as the organisations that perpetuate it.
Reverse sustainability reporting flips this. Led by journalistic enquiry, it engages the collaborative focus of the concerned internet crowd (think Wikipedia/Wikileaks), guided by academics, experts and industry specialists, to identify and home in on a target company’s environmental and climate impacts. The crowd then tells the company precisely what it wants to see it acting and reporting on.
It investigates and invites public and media inspection of both a company’s direct impacts and those implied by its trading relationships up and down its supply chains. Perhaps most importantly it is propelled by the public’s growing eagerness to know whose executive decisions are responsible for a business’s contribution to climate change and continuing environmental depletion.
This is likely to have profound effects for the marketing of all goods and services. Moreover, it will draw all companies into competition on their records, even those which have never before considered it necessary to get busy on sustainability or to report on their environmental impacts.
It will be seen that a company’s movement towards genuine, bankable sustainability can not be characterised by greenwash or individual product breakthroughs, but by the result of cumulative human ingenuity, resourcefulness and input.
Instead, its successful achievement and the story of its progress along the way will prove a barometer of management intention, education, priority and, ultimately, competence.
The established sustainability reporting model sees larger companies report of their own volition on their efforts towards sustainability. They select those of their activities and impacts on which they will report. They then park this as a one-way blast in a pdf on their web site. They offer no dialogue or possibility of comeback to their audience. This model’s time is now up and its one-sided nature will come to be seen as unreliable and irrelevant as the organisations that perpetuate it.
Reverse sustainability reporting flips this. Led by journalistic enquiry, it engages the collaborative focus of the concerned internet crowd (think Wikipedia/Wikileaks), guided by academics, experts and industry specialists, to identify and home in on a target company’s environmental and climate impacts. The crowd then tells the company precisely what it wants to see it acting and reporting on.
It investigates and invites public and media inspection of both a company’s direct impacts and those implied by its trading relationships up and down its supply chains. Perhaps most importantly it is propelled by the public’s growing eagerness to know whose executive decisions are responsible for a business’s contribution to climate change and continuing environmental depletion.
This is likely to have profound effects for the marketing of all goods and services. Moreover, it will draw all companies into competition on their records, even those which have never before considered it necessary to get busy on sustainability or to report on their environmental impacts.
It will be seen that a company’s movement towards genuine, bankable sustainability can not be characterised by greenwash or individual product breakthroughs, but by the result of cumulative human ingenuity, resourcefulness and input.
Instead, its successful achievement and the story of its progress along the way will prove a barometer of management intention, education, priority and, ultimately, competence.
