IRRC Institute Report Released: Integrated Financial and Sustainability Reporting in the United States

Recently, the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute (IRRC), "a not-for-profit organization . . . [which] serve[s] as a funder of environmental, social and corporate governance research" released a report titled, Integrated Financial and Sustainability Reporting in the United States (2013). The 290-page report available here, discusses how,

[e]very company in the S&P 500 except one reports some form of sustainability disclosure, but fewer quantify those disclosures in terms of bottom line impacts, accordi"ng to a new report from the IRRC Institute (IRRCI) and the Sustainable Investments Institute (SI2). That report is the first to comprehensively benchmark the status of integrated reporting in the U.S.
. . .
The 285-page report analyzes sustainability disclosures on a sector-by-sector basis, and examined a total of 56,000 individual data points, across both mandated SEC filings and voluntary sustainability reports. The report examined disclosures for 2012. Looking across the entire S&P 500, the report discovered that:

• 499 companies made at least one sustainability related disclosure, but only 7, or 1.4% integrate financial and sustainability reporting. Zions Corporation is the only company not to include any sustainability disclosure across the various reports examined. The 7 companies which included a statement on integrated reporting were American Electric Power, Clorox, Dow Chemical, Eaton, Ingersoll Rand, Pfizer and Southwest Airlines.
• Nearly three quarters (74 percent) of the companies placed a dollar figure on at least one sustainability-related initiative, though they frequently also mentioned other initiatives whose benefits/costs were not quantified.
• 43.4% of the companies linked executive compensation to some type of sustainability criteria.

A webinar to review the report findings is scheduled for Friday, May 3, 2013, at 2 PM ET (Register here).