Growth in the number of public companies reporting key sustainability measures is ‘slowing dramatically’ and may have reached a plateau, according to a study by investment research firm CK Capital.
The annual increase in companies reporting energy use ‒ one measure of sustainability ‒ slowed to 5 percent in 2011 from 72 percent in 2007, the report states. The annual increase in the number of companies reporting sustainability data related to water, waste, employee turnover, greenhouse gas emissions and other key measures shows a similar trend.
‘We believe this slowdown may reflect a natural saturation rate of quantitative sustainability reporting among the world’s publicly traded companies, at least in the context of the current global policy environment,’ the report authors write. ‘It is likely that new types of intervention by policymakers would be needed to push disclosure beyond these saturation rates and, ultimately, to achieve completed first-generation reporting by the world’s publicly traded companies.’
The study, which annually ranks global stock exchanges based on the sustainability disclosure practices of their companies, rates BME Spanish Exchanges as the top exchange operator this year, up from fourth place last year. OMX Helsinki comes second, up from third place last year.
Tokyo Stock Exchange comes third, followed by the Oslo Stock Exchange, Johannesburg Stock Exchange and Euronext Paris. While eight of the top 10 exchanges are from Europe, CK Capital says exchanges in emerging markets are rapidly advancing and may overtake exchanges in developed markets by 2015 in terms of the proportion of large companies that disclose the seven key sustainability indicators.
‘This would constitute a watershed moment in the history of corporate reporting, as the developed world has, in effect, had a 20-year head start in driving sustainability disclosure,’ the report states.
