Sustainability reporting keeps growing, moving from a first pioneering phase to become a standard practice. The latter was found by the Global Reporting Initiative in its annual report “Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)’s Year in Review 2010/11”.
GRI is a global multi-stakeholder network that is engaged in defining sustainability reporting procedures and their dissemination. The Enel Group participates in drawing up the G4 guidelines for integrated reporting.
Reporting is globally increasing, with a significant growth of transparency in 2010 particularly in companies based in developing countries. The GRI works closely with companies and organizations in developing nations to increase the diffusion of reports and improve their quality, and will continue to monitor financial sheets through its Sustainability Disclosure Database.
In general, the amount of sustainability reports produced by an increasing amount of companies is rising. A study by KPMG showed that 95 percent of the 250 world’s largest companies currently draw up their own sustainability report, compared with 80 percent in 2008. The survey also emphasized that most of the top 100 companies in 26 of the 34 countries that were surveyed presently produce sustainability reports.
"The practice of sustainability reporting is growing fast. (…) Anecdotic evidence also shows that the quality of reports improves as companies gain experience, including the integration of the practice into the core business”, said Ernst Ligteringen, CEO of GRI. He added that “sustainability reporting allows companies to measure, monitor and improve their performance".
Over the past few years, the Enel Group has received many awards and acknowledgements for its CSR reporting. To be note, in particular, Enel’s outstanding performance in the Carbon Disclosure Project Supply Chain, the report compiled by CDP that assesses the transparency of environmental performance along the entire supply chain.
