U.S. Companies Continue to Underperform European and Japanese Businesses in Environmental and Social Disclosure

Few Have Adopted Risk Management Procedures to Mitigate the Impact of Operations on Climate Change

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Jul 25, 2012, 10:00 ET

NEW YORK, July 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- U.S. corporations continue to lag far behind their counterparts in other developed economies — notably the European Union and Japan — in transparency of environmental and social practices. According to a new study by The Conference Board, the overall disclosure rate of this type of information by U.S. companies in the Russell 1000 is 10 percent, compared to 19 percent for a global sample of 3000 business organizations tracked by Bloomberg's Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) database.

The new report, Sustainability Practices: 2012 Edition — a collaboration between The Conference Board, Bloomberg, and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Focal Point USA — covers a total of 72 environmental and social practices including: atmospheric emissions, water consumption, biodiversity policies, labor standards, human rights practices, and charitable and political contributions. For benchmarking purposes, Bloomberg ESG data is compared with the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000, and further analyzed across 11 business sectors and four revenue groups.

For instance, according to the study, only 16 percent of U.S.-based Russell 1000 companies have an established set of risk management procedures designed to mitigate the impact of business operations on climate change. In the global sample, by contrast, formal climate-change policies have been adopted by 39 percent of companies, with 57 percent reporting emission-reductions protocols. The study also found that only 10 percent of the 3000 companies in the global sample publish their annual employee turnover rate.

"In our sample of companies from around the globe, the percentage of Russell 1000 U.S. companies offering disclosure across the full range of ESG practices is half of the world average," said Matteo Tonello, Managing Director of Corporate Leadership, The Conference Board and co-author of the study with Research Associate Thomas Singer. "In part, progress has been slow because many companies cannot find the valuable quantitative comparisons that would help them measure their performance on these extra-financial activities."

"A high turnover rate can often be an indicator of problems within an organization: in particular, it can be symptomatic of employee dissatisfaction or the presence of unsafe and unhealthy working conditions," said Thomas Singer, Research Associate in the Corporate Leadership practice at The Conference Board and a co-author of the report.

"We applaud the efforts of The Conference Board of thoroughly researching ESG data," said Mike Wallace, Director of GRI Focal Point USA. "This study truly helps extrapolate the sustainability topics companies are most likely to report on publicly. Such knowledge is essential to enhancing reporting standardization and data consistency, in line with the core mission of GRI."

Other Key Findings in the Report

The business community continues to lack widely adopted transparency standards on the presence of minority employees in management and senior-level positions. Two percent of companies in the global sample reported the percentage of minorities in management positions, compared to 5 percent of the S&P 500 and 3 percent of the Russell 1000. Based on these very small sub-samples of disclosing companies, the median percentage of minorities in management is 20 percent for the Bloomberg sample of companies, 20 percent for S&P 500 companies, and 19 percent for Russell 1000 companies.
Mounting pressure from shareholders may foster additional disclosure on political contributions by U.S. corporations. Company size matters even with respect to the disclosure of political contributions (e.g. direct monetary donations, use of corporate resources, and political advertising). Thirteen percent of U.S. companies in the S&P 500 index reported the total dollar value of corporate donations to political groups, parties or individuals, compared to 7 percent of the Russell 1000.
Aside from the disclosure on the adoption of a health & safety policy, data on workforce accidents and fatalities is seldom available. Fifty-nine percent of companies in the global sample collected by Bloomberg reported having adopted a health & safety policy, compared to 52 percent of U.S. companies in the S&P 500 and 35 percent of those in the Russell 1000. However, this type of disclosure is almost never supplemented with quantitative data on employee accidents and fatalities: only 2 percent of Russell 1000 U.S. companies do indicate the number of accidents occurred in the workplace in the previous 12 months, compared to 12 percent of companies in the global index.
Corporations hesitate to disclose employee turnover rates, which would provide insights on the quality of their relations with a key stakeholder group. Employee turnover is an easily measurable metric of corporate social performance, as it represents the rate at which a company either gains or loses employees. However, most corporations do not disclose it—presumably as it may impair the company's ability to attract new talent: only 10 percent of the 3000 companies in the global sample publish their annual employee turnover rate, and the percentage is even lower when U.S. companies are analyzed alone (7 percent of the S&P 500 and 4 percent of the Russell 1000). The median annual employee turnover for the global sample is 9 percent.
Larger companies are more likely to invest the resources necessary to prepare a periodic publication on sustainability. A sustainability report is the product of an enterprise-wide process designed to capture metrics of performance that are not traditionally included in annual disclosure to shareholders. Because of the resources required to establish and regularly conduct such process, the practice of publishing periodic sustainability reports varies depending on company size. While 45 percent of S&P 500 companies have made the investment, only 24 percent of Russell 1000 companies release a sustainability report.
Energy and water consumption by individual businesses remains largely undisclosed in the United States. Only a small fraction of U.S. companies (13 percent of the Russell 1000) have a unified process to measure and report on the consumption of energy across their business activities. In the global sample, 47 percent of companies do so. Similar discrepancies were found from the analysis of water consumption disclosure (12 percent in the Russell 1000, compared to 37 percent in the Bloomberg sample).
The adoption of a waste reduction policy is more common, even in the United States, but most U.S. companies do not document the total waste they generate. Almost one third of U.S. companies in the Russell 1000 (31 percent) reported the adoption of a waste reduction policy—including the collection, transport, processing, reuse, recycling, or disposal (i.e., through incineration or landfilling) of waste materials. However, only 10 percent of the Russell 1000 companies calculated and reported on the total amount of waste (hazardous and non-hazardous) materials they disposed of. In the global sample, the percentage was almost four times as high (37 percent).
After a decade of regulatory reforms on corporate governance, U.S. companies are among the leaders in the adoption of business ethics policies. Although there is no securities law requirement to adopt it, most U.S. public companies have an internal written code of ethics that complies with NYSE and NASDAQ standards for listed organizations. Eighty-six percent of U.S. companies comprising the Russell 1000 (and as many as 93 percent of the larger U.S. companies in the S&P 500) reported having a business ethics policy. Similar rules have been introduced in many other countries in recent years; however, this is the one of the few sustainability practices documented in the report for which U.S. business corporations outperform the global sample (80 percent).

Source: Sustainability Practices: 2012 Edition, Report # R-1493-12-RR, The Conference Board

Download the full report at this link: http://bit.ly/NQJdub

View a video to see report co-authors Matteo Tonello and Thomas Singer discuss some of the key findings of the Sustainability Practices Report here: http://bit.ly/Od0ICx

About the Conference Board The Conference Board is a global, independent business membership and research association working in the public interest. Our mission is unique: To provide the world's leading organizations with the practical knowledge they need to improve their performance and better serve society. The Conference Board is a non-advocacy, not-for-profit entity holding 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt status in the United States. www.conference-board.org

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About the GRI Focal Point USA The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is a nonprofit organization producing a comprehensive Sustainability Reporting Framework to enable greater organizational transparency. The Framework, which is widely used around the world and includes the Reporting Guidelines, sets out the principles and indicators organizations can use to report their economic, environmental, and social performance. GRI is committed to continuously improving and increasing the use of the Guidelines, which are freely available to the public. The GRI Focal Point USA (based in New York) provides guidance and support to local organizations in the United States, driving GRI's mission to make sustainability reporting standard practice.

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