Dan Atkins, SENIOR CONSULTANT, DELOITTE & TOUCHE - ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES, DENMARK.
My past year in Denmark has certainly has been an unique and rewarding experience, not the least of it trying to learn Danish which I must admit is not an easy thing to do. I have witnessed significant activity throughout Europeas businesses are increasingly recognizing and establishing their role in managing environmental and social issues. My primary focus has been the verification and advice of corporate environmental reports, the financial implications of environmental aspects, and assisting financial institutions' design environmental assessment criteria as component of their investment procedures.
I thought it might be of benefit to offer an insight to some of the initiatives that I have been following during my time here.
The WBCSD is a coalition of 125 MNCs from 30 countries and representing about 20 major industry sectors united by a shared commitment to the environment and to the principles of economic growth and sustainable development. WBCSD’s mission is to provide business leadership as a catalyst towards sustainable development and promote the attainment of eco-efficiency through high standards of environmental and resource management in business.
WBCSD have established various working groups and initiatives which provide member companies the opportunity to participate in creating solutions for emerging business issues.
The following commentary on eco-efficiency,corporate social responsibility and financial indicators project has been extracted from the WBCSD Presidents Report 1997/98 which was released at the Council Meeting in New York, 6 November 1998.
The working group intends to develop a framework of metrics and their reporting for eco-efficiency that is accepted and used by the world business community and its stakeholders.They have developed a listing of categories and aspects of environmental and business related performance of operations and products, and selected there of those indicators,which are universally measurable and comparable across all businesses. With these, eco-efficiency can be expressed as the relationship between the economic performance or functional value and the environmental performance.
The work attempts to provide guidance for companies on how to manage the issue of corporate social responsibility. In the beginning of this year the working group met with outside experts to help scope and define the key elements of CSR. From this work, three subgroups were formed: ”Scoping” and mapping the boundaries, Practice (casestudies), and Measuring, Assessing and Reporting. These groups performed preliminary research and analysis which was then incorporated into a background paper for the September Stakeholder Dialogue on Corporate Social Responsibility held in the Netherlands.
This initiative is receiving a high priority fromWBCSD members and increasingly the investment community is also beginning to focus on this area. To this end we (Deloitte &Touche) have formed an alliance with Schierbeck & Thorsen (human rights experts) and developed a Corporate Human Rights approach that I intend to work closely with over the forthcoming year.
The Foundation co-sponsored with the UNEP Insurance Initiative, a campaign to standardize environmental assessments in the financial sector, and launched a joint report at the Cologne Annual meeting of the UNEP Insurance Initiative. The WBCSD Metrics working group is the main partner for continuing this initiative. Various educational projects in the financial sector are being evaluated.
Both these initiatives are relatively similar in focus and their meetings in Cologne, Germany and Cambridge, U.K. drew similar conclusions. My observation was that leading financial institutions recognize that there is a financial implication associated with a company’s level of environmental performance. In particular, various investment funds have established specific funds with screening techniques focusing on environmental criteria and the majority of these funds have found their returns have exceeded the MCI World Index. A major stated challenge for these investment funds is obtaining reliable and consistent information to base their decisions on.
A powerful new initiative launched by the Coalition for Environmental Responsible Economics (CERES) & WBCSD commenced in the summer of 1998. The GRI’s mission is to establish through global, voluntary, and multi-stakeholder process, the foundation for uniform corporate sustainability reporting worldwide.They seek to advance the practice of reporting to serve the three linked goals of sustainable business practice - environmental protection, economic well being and social equity.
A first stage of GRI report is scheduled for release in march of 1999 at a major international symposium to be co-organized with the UNEP, ACCA, WBCSD and other organizations. After this initial release for comment and testing by the business and stakeholder communities, GRI has devised an ambitious timeline for completion of its work to share the results of this effort through the year 2000.
This project is being led by the WBCSD and European Partners for the Environment (EPE), and supported by the European Commission’s Directorate General III (Industry). The EEEI commenced on 28 October 1998 with the kick-off meeting held at Deloitte & Touche in Copenhagen.The EEEI is intending to develop a convergence process of economical and industrial policies towards eco-efficiency in the countries via an agreement between the stakeholders on a limited number of suggested action points:
If APCEA news journal readers would like information on any of the above mentioned items I would be happy to assist where I can. I can also recommend the following Internet sites:
http://www.wbcsd.ch and
http://www.tomorrow-web.com
