The Centre for Sustainability and Excellence (CSE) has recently released an annual report entitled “Sustainability (ESG) Reporting Trends: North America 2018” which focuses on the development of ESG reporting in the US and Canada.
In the 2018 report, CSE has investigated more than 600 sustainability reports from companies in the North America for the 2017 reporting period, and has come up with a new analysis framework called “Return on Sustainability™” (RoS) which can be used to find out the relationship between companies’ ESG performance and their financial results.
The framework helps evaluate how companies’ revenue is affected by their sustainability strategies and reporting, and the research results show that there is a positive relation between a company’s sustainability and financial performance, as demonstrated by some of the companies’ high ESG scores in the CSRHub Ranking. Therefore, if companies want to increase revenue, they are encouraged to adopt comprehensive sustainability strategies, report on their ESG performance regularly, and increase transparency in ESG disclosure.
On the other hand, CSE mentions about an increasing popularity of the use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Blockchain, and their impacts on sustainability in the business sector. It is predicted that since more and more companies start to apply AI in different business areas for developing various sustainability solutions, there may be a huge transformation in companies’ CSR practices and sustainability reporting. Whereas the use of Blockchain, referring to the technology which provides a safe database for storing digital information, is assumed to lead to a transformation in business transactions. It is expected that due to the safe and secure nature of Blockchain, companies can help increase the efficiency in business transactions and products recalls, promote food safety, eliminate counterfeit and ensure the ethics of business partners, thus raising their overall efficiency and sustainability performance.
Generally speaking, over the past three years, there has been a rising trend of ESG reporting as there are more companies in North America adopting appropriate sustainability strategies and following international standards, such as SDGs and GRI, when preparing ESG reports.
Source: https://cse-net.org/cses-new-research-links-financial-and-corporate-sustainability-esg-performance-2/
