Environmental, Social & Governance Briefs

The author believes the biggest risk nobody seems to want to talk about is that a very large percentage of companies’ management personnel lack the necessary skills and/or motivation to competently self-assess and report on the true state of risk related to value creation and preservation.

India is the first country in the world to make corporate social responsibility (CSR) mandatory, following an amendment to the Companies Act, which requires companies with a net worth above Rs 5 billion, revenues above Rs 10 billion, or net profits of Rs 50 million or more to spend 2 percent of net profits on CSR initiatives. The country has countless priorities that companies can look to for guidance on CSR initiatives.

Integrated reporting expands traditional thinking, with its predominant focus on financial capital (i.e., monocapitalist), by casting a wider net to assess how value is created across multiple capitals (i.e., multicapitalist).

Recent developments concerning corporate sustainability suggest that compensation committees of public company boards of directors, as well as human resources executives, should consider the use of metrics developed to measure sustainability in incentive compensation plans.

How do asset owners tell their multi-dimensional value-creation story in ways that go beyond simplistic price signals which might mask value destruction, particularly at the collective level? By adopting Integrated Reporting (or IR as it is commonly abbreviated), we believe.

The term “natural disaster” is a misnomer. Natural ecosystems often require disturbances such as fires and floods to remain healthy. They have an inherent resilience to the occasional battering. Crises created by destructive natural events might be more aptly referred to as “social disasters,” because of the toll of life and economic damage left in their wake. Framing such events as social disasters places them in a different light, shifting the burden on all sectors of society to proactively ma

The Conference Board has launched an expanded initiative to track and benchmark societal investments, and their resulting impact, extending the organization’s 75 years of leadership in corporate citizenship research.