Reporting 3.0 Platform
= "The Mission of the Reporting 3.0 Platform is to help catalyze the trigger-function of reporting to spur the emergence of a regenerative and inclusive global economy".
URL = http://reporting3.org/
"corporate disclosure plays a key role in influencing the trajectory of the global economy; so, if the economic design is inherently flawed and unsustainable, reporting can help resolve this dilemma."
Description
"The Reporting 3.0 Platform was established to convene a neutral, pre-competitive, global public good space for diverse stakeholders to co-create solutions whereby the reporting field raises its level of ambition to play its rightful role in spurring a regenerative, green and inclusive global economy. The Reporting 3.0 Platform does this by curating events (such as conferences, labs, and virtual online dialogues) and Blueprint Projects that gather Working Groups to collaborate on designing new structures that build off the foundations of existing standards and frameworks. The platform naturally fosters the type of collaboration that makes a new operating system for future-fit disclosure practices possible.
The Reporting 3.0 Platform was launched in 2012 by BSD Consulting with the aim to create a global multi-stakeholder community focused on identifying and fulfilling the potential of reporting to serve the intersecting interests of sustainability, financial performance, and growth. To better serve this interest and expand its public good value, an independent not-for-profit structure was established in late 2016." (http://reporting3.org/#about-us)
Characteristics
"This four-pronged Blueprint design stems from the recognition that this quartet of areas are distinct yet interconnected and interrelated elements of the overall disclosure regime, thus each element warrants in-depth focus in its own right, following a standardized, systemic approach, before synthesizing the resulting findings into a single report. Further, this recognition stems from the following outcomes of the earlier R3 conference deliberations:
Purpose: Sustainability and integral disclosure need a clearly defined “North Star” purpose.
The Reporting 3.0 community recognizes the absence of a clear end-goal in current sustainability and integrated reporting standards, frameworks and practices. As government leaders at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in 2012 proclaimed in The Future We Want Outcome Document, the “overarching goal” is the achievement of a green and inclusive economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty alleviation.2 Yet current reporting generally lacks a direct connection to this purpose of creating a green, inclusive, and open economy. More frankly stated: no business can be truly sustainable in an unsustainable world; consequently, there will never be integral sustainability without a seamless connection to an economic system design whereby market mechanisms “do the right thing” through price signals and monetary incentivation, including subsidies and taxation.
Sustainability Context Gap:
While The Future We Want takes an overall macro perspective, sustainability reporting and integrated reporting focus on the micro-level, organization-specific perspective, thus creating a micro-macro gap between the UN goal and company reporting. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) advocates for closing this gap with its Sustainability Context Principle, which calls for “discussing the performance of the organization in the context of the limits and demands placed on environmental or social resources at the sector, local, regional, or global level.” This addresses “the underlying question of … how an organization contributes … to the improvement or deterioration of economic, environmental and social conditions, developments and trends.” However, “[r]eporting only on trends in individual performance (or the efficiency of the organization) fails to respond to this underlying question.”3 However, “to this day in the reporting world … Sustainability Context is incipient, uneven, and occasional,” said GRI Co-Founder and Inaugural Chief Executive Allen White (a Reporting 3.0 Validator). Today, sustainability and integrated reports describe company-specific incremental progress on issue-specific urgencies such as global warming, water shortages, biodiversity loss, human rights abuses and corruption; however, it is rare that companies account for their own proportionate contribution to these macro problems – and thus neither to their solutions.
Risk Management & Integral Materiality:
Material environmental, social and governance (ESG) information doesn’t yet automatically link through to fiduciary duties, creating a disconnect from risk management due to shortcomings in this materiality determination. In consequence, now underscored by new research by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) amongst its member companies, only 29% of the companies who outline material sustainability risks in sustainability reporting reflect the same information in their legal filings or disclosures.5 While 89% of companies indicate that sustainability issues could have a financial impact on their business, 70% don’t believe their risk management practices are adequately addressing those risks. This gaping gulf represents a stark reality check on the general failure of companies to link their sustainability efforts to their broader business disciplines and standard practices (such as Enterprise Risk Management). Attendees at Reporting 3.0 convenings consistently stressed the need for convergence of risk management, governance and remuneration with integral material sustainability, based on sound contextualization and proper impact assessments.
Collaboration & Ambition:
Reporting 3.0 convenings revealed broad perception of lagging collaboration and plateauing amibition levels amongst reporting and accounting standard setters, data analysts and information system architects, and new business model intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs, which are falling short on clarifying purpose, implementing sufficient success measurement, and achieving scalability at rates needed to be “on target” for ensuring the sustainability of the human race. That is what the four Blueprints aim to address collectively in order to align with the disclosure needs for a green, inclusive & open economy designed for regenerative and distributive capitalism.
Integral Blueprints:
The emergence of a third generation of “integral reporting” (after the first generation of financial reporting and the second generation of sustainability and integrated reporting) requires a fluid exchange of learning in all four areas described by the below Blueprint design. We also believe there needs to be a revolving process to update the Blueprints about every 3 years, given the speed of developments in all areas related to this set of recommendations." (http://reporting3.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/R3_Data_Blueprint_Report-1.pdf)
Status: The 2015 Conference
"The Reporting 3.0 Platform was launched in 2012 to test a premise: that corporate disclosure plays a key role in influencing the trajectory of the global economy; so, if the economic design is inherently flawed and unsustainable, reporting (and its interrelated elements) can help resolve this dilemma.
Furthermore, if reporting regimes are not fit-to-purpose, they too can be reformed so as to play their proper function in triggering a green, inclusive, and open global economy.
To explore this premise, Reporting 3.0 (R3) held three major international conferences through 2015, gathering a diversity of international experts from four continents and 15 countries. In addition, R3 convened various Transition Labs and Regional Roundtables during that period. In the process, R3 curated a neutral, pre-competitive, global public good platform for diverse stakeholders to consider solutions that build off the foundations of existing standards, frameworks, and practices whereby the reporting field raises its level of ambition to play its rightful role in spurring a regenerative, distributive economy that promotes thriving for all humanity.
The platform thus performs an “open” research and development (R&D) think tank function where ‘positive mavericks’ – who work productively (not obstructively) toward positive change; challenge constraints, structural limitations, unconscious biases, and shadow agendas; think and act at systems levels; and seek transformative (on top of incremental) change – collaborate to co-create a new operating system that generates fit-to-purpose disclosure practices.
The third international conference in November 2015 represented a watershed, when the R3 community determined that the premise holds sufficient validity to warrant ongoing exploration and advocacy.
Specifically, two determinations were made at the end of the conference:
- First, to better serve these interests and expand its global public good value, Reporting 3.0 spun off from its incubation under BSD Consulting to become the inaugural flagship program of “OnCommons,” a newly-formed independent not-for-profit, registered under German law as gGmbH (gemeinnützige GmbH).
- Second, to shift into a more active “solutions-generation” mode, R3 decided to launch a work ecosystem consisting of four interdependent Blueprint Projects in the areas of reporting, accounting,data, and new business models."
(http://reporting3.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/R3_Data_Blueprint_Report-1.pdf)