Integrated Reporting
A New Standard: the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
One of the Capital Institute’s eight over-arching goals is a transition to new metrics of social and environmental wellbeing. Much great work has already been done on the private sector component of this issue by groups like the Global Reporting Initiative, the Initiative for Responsible Investment, the International Integrated Reporting Committee, the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment, Global Initiative for Sustainable Ratings, and many others. These efforts all contribute to the public recognition that our current economic indicators are an insufficient compass for navigating the problems of critical resource scarcity and growing social disparities. But none of these projects has been able to build a coalition and model large enough to solve the problem in total.
Capital Institute Contributes to Harvard Ebook on Integrated Reporting
Capital Institute contributed to a new Ebook, just published by Harvard University Business School. The Landscape of Integrated Reporting is a collection of articles and thought pieces by those who attended a recent Integrated Reporting Workshop organized by Professor Robert Eccles, co-author of One Report. Our contribution is a letter written by a fictional CEO to her board of directors. Read it below and access the Ebook in its entirety here.
B Lab Advances Stakeholder Capitalism
I had the pleasure of attending B Lab’s National Leadership Gathering last week in Long Branch, New Jersey. B Lab is a non-profit organization dedicated to using the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. “B Corporations” explicitly seek to balance the needs of all stakeholders, and this requirement is written into their charter. Two States (Maryland and Vermont) have passed B Corp legislation, and many others are considering it, including New York.
B Lab Advances Stakeholder Capitalism
Submitted by John Fullerton on Sun, 10/24/2010 - 8:54pm
Author:
John Fullerton I had the pleasure of attending B Lab’s National Leadership Gathering last week in Long Branch, New Jersey. B Lab is a non-profit organization dedicated to using the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. “B Corporations” explicitly seek to balance the needs of all stakeholders, and this requirement is written into their charter. Two States (Maryland and Vermont) have passed B Corp legislation, and many others are considering it, including New York.
A Clarion Call for Corporations to Implement Integrated Value Reporting
One of the greatest obstacles to the rechanneling of financial flows toward investments that serve a more just and resilient economy is what can only be called the primitive state of corporate integrated value reporting. It is now of course common practice for companies to produce sustainability or CSR reports alongside their financial reports. And a handful of companies are now beginning to issue their financial results and CSR reports under one cover. But in their book One Report, Robert Eccles and Michael P. Krzus have issued a clarion call for companies to embark on something far more ambitious and transformative: collecting, analyzing and presenting their financial and nonfinancial data in such a way that their interrelationship is transparent to all stakeholders.
Bank Sarasin's "Resource Efficiency" Metrics Cast New Light on Sovereign Debt Creditworthiness
If you open up the papers lately, you’ll find the discussion of the sovereign debt crisis tends to focus narrowly on offending nations’ profligate spending and borrowing habits. While these behaviors have no doubt contributed to fiscal deficits, what is often overlooked is that addressing another kind of deficit--an ecological one--is of equal importance if nations are to sustain healthy and resilient economies. One bank is working to advance this notion by incorporating into its sustainability rating of sovereign debt a country's resource efficiency.
Bank Sarasin, a Swiss private bank founded in 1841, launched the first investment fund based on the concept of eco-efficiency in 1994 and has been including social factors in its sustainability ratings since 1997. Sarasin’s sustainability rating of sovereign debt assesses a country’s creditworthiness based not only on resource availability but also on resource efficiency. Viewing a country’s ability to repay its debt over the long-term through this holistic prism yields some noteworthy results: resource-rich but inefficient economies such as the United States and Russia appear particularly vulnerable to future rating downgrades while resource-scarce but efficient countries like Japan, the Netherlands, and Germany appear much less at risk.
NCIF's Social Performance MetricsSM for Banks
National Community Investment Fund (NCIF), a certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), was established in 1996 as a nonprofit entity “to invest capital in and enable knowledge transfer to Community Development Banking Institutions (CDBI) around the country.” CDBIs are depository financial institutions that operated in low- and moderate-income areas and have as their mission to generate economic and community development impact. NCIF currently has approximately $150 million in assets under management including $128 million of New Market Tax Credits. It has invested over $24 million in capital in 45 US CDBIs. Seventy-three percent of these institutions are either minority- or woman-owned or managed, and 19 percent are located in rural areas. NCIF has also provided seed capital to six de novo banks.
GIIN: Working For a More Transparent Impact Investing Sector
August 2012 Update—In June 2010 Capital Institute posted the profile below of the Global Impact Investors Network (GIIN), a not-for-profit focused on promoting a more transparent and efficient global impact investing market. The Global Impact Investors Network (GIIN) has since made significant strides through a variety of initiatives toward its goal of supporting the growth of the market sector.
