Integrated Thinking and Reporting

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

= "The health and stability of our businesses and economies are dependent on the health and stability of both the natural environment and the people living within it rather than the other way around.In order to create and maintain value into the future, organizations therefore need to integrate sustainability into their overall strategy and decision-making processes".

URL = http://www.accountingforsustainability.org/embedding-sustainability

Description

"We ask businesses to adopt an integrated approach, which means for companies to think about and communicate their commercial activity and sustainability strategy as one in the same thing.

Integrating sustainability into an organisation’s strategy and decision-making processes helps to reduce future regulatory, resource and price risks and provides a vision of how business may be impacted by short, medium and long term environmental and social changes. It also provides a more holistic view of the organisation in terms of its operations, risks and opportunities to enable more sustainable management and value creation into the future.

As a first step, we suggest businesses have conversations at the most senior level to understand the risks and opportunities of addressing current, medium and long term social and environmental challenges.

In order to stimulate this discussion , we have developed a tool called the Big Boardroom Agenda which covers five topics designed as a provocation. By having a discussion in line with these topics you will be required to stand back from the day-to-day running of the business and consider how your commercial operations respond to a fast changing external context and what your strategy for value creation is in the medium and long term.

Communicating the total value of your business to stakeholders, such as investors, is a crucial element of this approach. In order to communicate a more holistic value than is possible with just financial indicators, businesses can use the Integrated Reporting (IR) framework, developed by IIRC, an organisation founded by The Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability.

All organisations depend on various forms of capital for their success. In the Framework, the capitals comprise financial, manufactured, intellectual, human, social and relationship, and natural.

Each capital is increased, decreased or transformed through the activities and outputs of the organisation. For example, an organisation’s financial capital is increased when it makes a profit and the quality of its human capital is improved when employees become better trained. (http://www.bitc.org.uk/issues/responsible-leadership/integrated-thinking-and-reporting)