Increasingly, companies are including sustainability statements in their annual reports. Some even argue that this is already a requirement, given that the SEC requires companies to report a known trend with uncertain consequences, which is a good description of climate change.
While few would go as far in interpreting SEC reporting requirements as a mandate -as does the former XBRL-US Steering Committee chairman, Daniel Roberts – the pressure is mounting from the SEC for companies to report on CSR/ESG (Corporate Social Responsibility / Environmental, Social and Governance) issues in their regulatory filings.
A number of organizations are advocating for sustainability reporting, such as the Global Reporting Initiative. But the Carbon Disclosure Project isn’t waiting for any government. It already gets voluntary disclosures from over 2,500 companies, including 330 members of the U.S. S&P 500. Why would these corporations annually disclose greenhouse gas emissions and climate change strategies? They share the belief that any company that is working to curb emissions today is girded for the future and therefore worthy of investment.
“Triple Bottom Line” reporting is another term for this type of reporting which adds ecological and social performance into the traditional economic performance reporting framework.
We at EDGAR Online would like to add that XBRL would be an ideal technical solution for sharing the new information online, as consistently structured data. An XBRL taxonomy for sustainability reporting could be created for tagging all types of information that gets reported. Such data from various organizations could be accessed and shared online, for automated analysis, regardless of what software was used to create the original report.
We look forward to writing about that development in the future!
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