Rivet Software » CSR

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.

Just Do It

Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor — Fri, 13 May 2011 12:53:55 +0000

Nike just won best sustainability report in the Ceres-ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) North American Awards for Sustainability Reporting.

But as Paul Baier at GreenBiz points out (with a few spelling errors):

When reading traditional annual reports, financial analysis (sic) quickly skim pass (sic) the glossy pictures, platitudes, CEO letter and other marketing fluff and head straight to the financial numbers and footnotes.

Savvy CSR report readers do the same. The value is in the numbers.

So it’s also good to hear that the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) are working even closer together to maintain an explanatory mapping between each other’s sustainability and emissions indicators. That way the text and the numbers in GRI Index reports are more easily compared with those in CDP emissions reports.

Of course what would be even better is if those numbers could be standardized by referencing a single XBRL sustainability taxonomy. Then ‘scope 1′ emissions in a GRI report would always mean the same as ‘scope 1′ emissions in a CDP report – no matter what actual stakeholder report the number ended up in.

The Value in ESG Risk

Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor — Mon, 24 May 2010 20:37:42 +0000

As a follow-up to my previous post on the One Report book I’d like to highlight one of the many useful takeaways from the book, found on page 149. Here the authors address a critical issue for the ‘One Report’ camp, namely ‘quantifying the value’ of CSR. Or as I believe the Founder of Wendys was prone to say ‘Where’s the Beef’ (still not quite as catchy as ‘thats a some spicy meatball’ but you can’t have everything).

Eccles and Krzus highlight three ways to help quantify CSR value:

Which ESG topics represent opportunities to improve financial performance?
Which ESG topics represent risks of generating spending to avoid a downside?
Which ESG topics are not risks but investments that may create value for some stakeholders at a cost to shareholders?

Now if I was building an XBRL taxonomy for CSR reporting, these are three questions I would be validating all my element choices against.

Transparency by Stakeholder Engagement

Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:08:34 +0000

This brief lesson in corporate transparency Author’s Choice: Don’t Ignore the Transparency Imperative advocates that transparency is not just about presenting accurate, accessible and comparable information (e.g. using globally adopted standards such as XBRL) it is also about establishing a new level of engagement with the stakeholders of an organization. The example comes from a new book The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Business Will Win.