Rivet Software » Actions & Impact

7 Sustainability Trends

Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 18:21:37 +0000

As one of the unofficial sustainability evangelists here at Rivet, I thought you might like to review 7 Sustainability Trends that Every CFO Needs to Know – courtesy of GreenBiz.com – and think about this:

Because of the large number of functional areas that report to the CFO, sustainability offers the CFO an opportunity to drive sustainability into the organization for cost savings and competitive differentiation. Your organization needs your leadership in this area.

Land of the Rising Taxonomy

Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor — Tue, 17 May 2011 10:06:47 +0000

Fumiko Satoh of IBM Research in Tokyo has recently published a paper that advocates an XBRL Taxonomy for Estimating the Effects of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on Corporate Financial Positions. As the abstract suggests:

…disclosing the emissions data by using XBRL will be very beneficial for the analysis of the financial positions and emissions results of these companies. Interested third parties will want to combine the XBRL reports of the financial data and the emissions data. This will allow them to easily evaluate the companies from both the financial and environmental perspectives.

Luckily I don’t have to worry about the carbon impact of my blog postings. Though it might be a different matter if the focus of emissions disclosure was methane.

The Sustainability Stream

Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:55:19 +0000

Bob Schneider over at Hitachi has posted a useful article on the corporate actions taxonomy being worked on by the DTCC, SWIFT and XBRL US that references their interesting and thorough document - A Business Case to Improve Corporate Actions Communications. But when I read the post and the document it just makes me wonder – why is it only actions that “impact a security that has been traded, cleared, and settled on behalf of the investor” that are reported? What about all the actions that evidence the sustainability behaviour of a business and therefore have an impact on the environmental, social and governance (ESG) profile of the organization?

What I’m talking about here are actions such as:

Reducing carbon emissions through the use of new technology/working practices
Taking on new ethical suppliers into a corporate supply chain
Replacing old energy sources with renewables
Switching out product materials or components for improved sustainability
Improving waste management and recycling efforts

Among others…

The whole sustainability agenda has a golden opportunity to leapfrog old-style ‘rearview’ mirror reporting, even if it does use indicators like those advocated by the GRI, by moving towards a ‘real-time’ enterprise whereby corporate sustainability actions are reported pretty much as they happen – tweet style – using a simple XBRL taxonomy that lets all kinds of third parties receive and consume the data very easily. Just as we consume S.E.C. XBRL filings via an RSS feed now.

Instead of waiting for the annual sustainability report, which would still have a place as a summary of sustainable activity, the sustainability action stream would be fed all year around. Even if this stream consisted of only a handful of data elements/facts like company ticker, category of action, date of action, location of action and description of action – just think what could be done with this data stream to help analyze and monitor sustainability momentum. The sustainability stream would soon show who’s stuck in the stagnant backwaters and who is forging ahead in the white waters of sustainability in a much more effective way than a PDF published once a year.

I sincerely hope the sustainability stream is on the agenda of the imminent International Integrated Reporting Council meeting in London in July.