Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
which
rms disclosed information on the environmental impact of their operations and
products, many early reports were seen to be mainly public relations exercises, rather than
proper disclosure documents. To address this weakness in such reporting, the Global
Reporting Initiative (GRI) emerged in 1997, the product of a collaboration between the
Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) and the United Nations
Environment Program. The GRI sets guidelines as a means to establish a standardized
framework for corporate sustainability reports and to ensure that such reports adequately
and accurately re
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fl
ect
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rm performance on a variety of fronts, including environmental.
rms following the
reporting guidelines. The guidelines were revised in 2002, and again in 2006. Today there
are over 1000
The GRI's
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rst set of guidelines was released in 2000 with some 50
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rms that adhere to some degree to the GRI guidelines. Initially based in
CERES, a coalition of investors and environment and public interest groups in North
America, the GRI became a permanent organization in 2002. It is also a collaborating
center with the UNEP and in addition cooperates with the UN Global Compact, dis-
cussed below (GRI website: www.globalreporting.org). With GRI now a stand-alone
organization, and with its guidelines becoming somewhat of an oversight and quality
control mechanism for corporate sustainability reports, the reporting requirements for
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rms that sign on to this standard of reporting have increased over the years. The GRI
guidelines, however, have several categories of adherence, which
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rms self-declare or have
veri
ed externally by a third party.
While encouraging corporations to disclose information about the environmental and
social impacts of their operations can go some way to encouraging
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rms to improve their
performance on these fronts, sustainability reporting has been critiqued as a weak mech-
anism for corporate greening. It relies heavily on self-reporting with no real external over-
sight of compliance (Utting, 2005). Because there are several categories of adherence to
the GRI guidelines, it is easy for
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rms to sign on to the least demanding of these - prepar-
ing their reports with reference to the GRI guidelines without having them externally
veri
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ed - and still advertise that they are GRI compliant.
UN Global Compact
The Global Compact (GC) is a pact between the UN and global business players that calls
on corporations to adhere to a set of ten social, environmental and human rights goals.
The GC, launched by then UN Secretary General Ko
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Annan in July 2000, requests
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rms to incorporate these goals into their mission statements as well as into their opera-
tions (Therien and Pouliot, 2006). With respect to the environment, corporations are
speci
cally asked to support the precautionary approach (Principle 7), to undertake ini-
tiatives to promote environmental responsibility (Principle 8), and to develop and di
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ff
use
environmentally friendly technologies (Principle 9). By 2007, some 3100
rms had signed
on to the GC as participants. However, there are no strict reporting or membership
requirements other than making a public pledge and providing an annual communication
of progress to the UN (for which
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rms can now submit their sustainability reports pro-
vided they follow GRI guidelines). Because there is no oversight or monitoring, it is very
easy for
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rms to join the GC.
NGOs have critiqued the GC as 'bluewash' (Bruno and Karliner, 2002). They claim that
TNCs are using the GC as a way to associate themselves in the UN, which helps to
improve their public image, without having to do much in terms of changing their actual
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