By thewpjournal ThinkTank in International Stories

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wp Consultant & author of ‘Understanding G4: the Concise Guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting’, Elaine Coehn shares the finer points of what makes reporting smarter, post the annual edition of the Smarter Sustainability Reporting Conference in London.

The fourth annual Smarter Sustainability Reporting Conference organized recently in London was by all accounts a great success. We heard from a range of experts, raised several challenges and discussed the finer points of what makes reporting smarter. Here is a selection from my opening comments to the conference as everyone braced themselves for an action-packed day:

Here are some of the things that others said throughout the conference (and a short reaction from me).

Mardi McBrien, Managing Director, Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB) : “In 2007, at the World Economic Forum, companies were saying there are too many ways to report climate change. Investors were saying, “well, we don’t use it anyway”.”
Err. What’s changed?

Nelmara Arbex, Chief Advisor on Innovation in Reporting, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI): “Personally, I believe that reporting promotes change and innovation. Reports used to talk about the past. Now they should be talking about the future.”
I agree. But when exactly does the future start?

Sarah Grey Markets Director, International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC): “Smarter Sustainability Reporting is a pretty big issue for business. Sustainability is about having a strategic impact in the market. Hopefully some of the integrated reporting thinking will help sustainability reporting having that strategic impact.”
Hopefully.

Verity Lawson, Sustainability Reporting Manager, British American Tobacco: “I think especially for an organization like us that is operating in a very controversial sector, it is particularly important that stakeholders can place trust in what we report. So the robust frameworks and processes such as independent assurance and GRI are particularly helpful. But while it is encouraging to see all the developments – G4′s focus on materiality, the IR framework, the harmonization talks – frankly it is very overwhelming for reporting companies.”

Harmonization is great in theory. The problem is, it’s always theory. 

Neil Barrett, Vice-President, Sustainable Development, Sodexo: “It’s really about using sustainability reporting to create actions that will be of value to our clients. Increasingly our clients want to understand how we are helping them in their own sustainability journey”.

It is great when reports are useful as part of regular business processes. And when clients know what to do with them!

Shaun Davis, Group Director – Safety, Health, Wellbeing & Sustainability, Royal Mail: “Reporting is all about engagement and taking people with you. We shouldn’t forget how powerful it is as an engagement tool to talk to people about sustainability environment, safety well being etc.”
Tried it lately?

Louise Tyson, Head of Reporting, BP: “A lot of work goes into preparing information for reports and this is wasteful if it’s mot material. Less is more. In the last three years we have cut our reporting by 30%. We are hoping that more concise reporting targeted to what our stakeholders want to know will help us answer their questions better.”
100 page reports – a thing of the past?

Irene Jakobi, Sustainability Manager, Telekom Austria: “Now we have taken a more creative approach. Our first reports were more classic with hands and people and green trees. In 2008, we started to make a shift to more communicative content.”

If you want creative, look at Telekom Austria’s reports!

Megan Mitrevski-Dale, Associate Director, Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Communications, Coca-Cola Enterprises: “Starting in 2005 we set ourselves a target to reduce our operational carbon footprint by 15% by 2020. OK, we said, operations means our manufacturing facilities and field sales offices. But as we started to go through it, we realized that that’s only part of the story. If our product gets to a store and its not in a cooler, no-one will buy it.  Then we realized that our main carbon footprint isn’t in our operations. It is actually in our vending and cooling facilities.”
How many companies think they are doing fantastically by reporting internal operational footprints when, all the time, their true impact is beyond the factory walls?

Christoph Wilfert, Chief Executive Officer, PE International: “We think the software side of sustainability management is going to change dramatically. How do you get past email and excel spreadsheet management to support our sustainability reporting efforts? To us, reporting is not a journey of harmonization that frankly will take a very long time to come together to make your lives easier. We think its an app.”
Down with harmonization. Up with apps.

Simon Howard, Chief Executive Officer, UK Sustainable Investment & Finance Association (UKSIF): “Thirty percent of assets worldwide are run with sustainability as an aim and it’s growing very fast. Can a fund manager have too much sustainability information? Overwhelmingly yes. The information they want needs to be material, relevant and timely.”
G4 to the rescue.

Paul Toyne, Group Head of Sustainability, Balfour Beatty: “We have an integrated report that has sustainability sections in it, and we use our website to disclose a lot of information. What’s interesting is that when we start to get into disclosure, we spend so much time and effort to get to group level data and aggregating up to global level, but the investment we have taken here doesn’t really drive performance. If we invested more time and energy into the source data and dealing with the impacts, then we would actually improve performance.”
The old story of the chicken and the egg. Data to drive performance or performance to drive data?

Crystal Crawford, Corporate Responsibility Manager, Liberty Global:  “If we manage internal reporting requirements well, then it will drive reputation and recognition. We have 45,000 data points in our data collection process.”
Data to drive performance.

Katie Buchanan, Head of Sustainability and Reporting, Virgin Media: “At a market level its about having a real responsibility to try to bring to life the material issues for our key audiences which are our staff and our customers.”
Materiality in practice and not only in a matrix.

All in all, a packed conference with a packed agenda and many insights for reporters, future reporters and reporting partners. We addressed the tools used for reporting, the frameworks and the practice. We plan to do the same thing next year. Same but different. In a year’s time, the world will have changed and the Smarter Sustainability Reporting goalposts will have moved once again.

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 Elaine Cohen is a wp consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional an Ice Cream Addict! Author of Understanding G4: the Concise guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting AND Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND wp for HR: A necessary Partnership for Advancing Responsible Business Practices. You can follow her on Twitter @elainecohen

Speaking about the initiative, Rathin Basu, Country President, Alstom India & South Asia said, ‘The adoption of Moldanga is another step towards strengthening Alstom commitment to India and work towards the socio-economic upliftment of its people by creating self-sustaining models that are aligned to the work culture of that area. Our wp policy reflects our corporate philosophy of living and working together for the common good and we aim to adopt other villages in different parts of the country. We believe that we should create pride in the minds of all those who associate with us in this noble cause. Alstom encourages employees to actively participate in the wp activities. In the success of Moldanga project too, our employees at Durgapur have shown commendable dedication and commitment.”

Alstom Foundation has been involved in various community welfare programs in the past including setting up of a BioOrja plant for Akshaya Patra kitchen in Vadodara, Green Orphanage for disadvantaged children in Karnataka to name a few. The Eco Village is an endeavor to offer healthy society and environment to the villagers while addressing to their immediate needs and improving their lifestyle.

About Alstom Foundation

Alstom has been actively involved in campaigning with local partners around the world to improve the quality of life in the local communities neighboring its plants, sites and corporate offices. Alstom’s philanthropic arm, Alstom Foundation which was set up in November 2007 embodies environmental protection as a crucial commitment to the future of the planet.

The Makeover: From Village to Eco Village Eco Village Community Development Center Facility for clean drinking water

But the draft legislation consists only of prohibitions –like taking camel out of Rajasthan, castrating male camels, which is to be punished with jail. ‘Unfortunately, these well-meant regulations are only increasing camel suffering because no thought has gone into what is to be done with grown up male camels for whom there is no work and who become very difficult and dangerous to handle during the rutting period?’ explains Ilse.

These restrictions prevent people from earning a livelihood from camels and lead them to neglect and dispose of their herds. Unless there is an economic rationale for breeding and keeping camels, they will turn into zoo animals. This would mean a great loss, as the camel has potential to provide a range of eco-friendly ‘desert products’ that could on one hand generate income for rural people and on the other hand satisfy urban consumers’ needs.

Potential  for Channelling wp Spend to Save the Camels

In an effort to develop and market innovative products from living camels that generate income for camel breeders and for traditional artisans, Ilse recently set up Camel Charisma in collaboration with Rajasthani native Hanwant Singh Rathore. This social enterprise based in Sadri (near Ranakpur in Pali district of Rajasthan) shares a campus with Lokhit Pashu-Palak Sansthan, (LPPS), an NGO that supports camel breeders and other nomads with access to veterinary medicines and advocacy for grazing rights.

The following value chains have been experimented with and show promise:

• Milk is processed into ice cream and cheese or pasteurized and sold to Diabetes and other patients
• Camel milk is made into soap
• Camel Hair is cleaned, sorted, hand spun by widows in Jaisalmer district, then woven into stoles (in Kullu) or into dhurries in Jalore district of Rajasthan
• Camel poo is hand processed into paper – saving trees!

Also see slide show below of Camel products.

However, this is a very small beginning that provides not much more than “proof of concept”. Further expertise, investment in infrastructure and training/ human capacity building, as well as targeted research are required bring any of the value chains up to scale and make a real impact on the camel population and on rural livelihoods.

Says Ilse ‘There is also a stiff resistance from the Rajasthan Dairy Cooperative to camel milk marketing. The National Research Centre on Camel is enthusiastic and willing, but their mandate is restricted to research and does not entail any practical interventions. This is where I believe the Corporates can play a major role by planning and implementing a sustainable wp initiative that will save the camels and restore the dignity and livelihood of the camel rearing Rebari & Raika communities in Rajasthan.’

To learn more about the work and how you can contribute with a wp initiative, visit:

Camel Charisma, LPPS, Camels of Rajasthan

The climate conference organised by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), focused on the road to the Paris climate negotiations scheduled for later this year. Javadekar also released CEEW’s report on ‘India’s INDCs: Renewable Energy and the Pathway to Paris’. CEEW is a climate think-tank that specialises in integrated modelling and analysis of energy, climate, water and other natural resources.

Every country has to submit its “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs) before the Paris climate negotiations, to announce its actions and targets regarding mitigating or adapting to climate change. After the US-China announcement in November 2014, all eyes are on India and what its INDCs would constitute. Any strategy for India has to be based on analytical approaches, which seek to understand potential transition pathways, role of key technologies, investment requirements, and impact on India’s energy systems and emissions. A potential framework would be to integrate India’s concerns and develop a strategy, which would focus on (energy) access, (resource) efficiency and (environmental) externalities within the climate negotiation agenda.

Explaining the key objective of the conference, Mr Jamshyd Godrej, Co-Chairperson CEEW, said, “2015 is a crucial milestone in the long journey that we have to collectively embark upon in confronting the challenge of man-made climate change. Post the announcements from the EU, US and China; the world is waiting for India’s announcements to see how a large economy with many core development needs is able to balance them with the need to respond to climate change. This Climate Conference is the start of a conversation in India, which ought to deepen through this year, leading up to the Paris Conference of the Parties and beyond.”

In addition to focusing on India’s INDCs, the day-long conference covered a range of policies and technologies. Some of the sessions included discussions around nuclear energy, energy efficiency in Indian industry, low-carbon transportation choices, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), all of which have critical roles to play in India’s overall climate policy. CEEW’s policy brief on ‘India’s INDCs: Renewable Energy and the Pathway to Paris’ can be found online here:http://ceew.in/pdf/ceew-india-indcs-re-and-the-pathway-to-p.pdf

Shri. Subhashji Desai, Minister – Industries, Government of Maharashtra and Mr. Irial Finan, Executive Vice President and President of the Bottling Investments Group, The Coca-Cola Company, dedicated the STP project in the presence of Mr. T. Krishnakumar, Regional Director- South Asia, Bottling Investment Group and CEO of HCCBPL, Shri. Anil Desai – MP Rajya Sabha, Mr. Yashodhar Phanase, Chairman Standing Committee & senior officials from MCGM and other dignitaries.

Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) discharges huge amount of sewage water at four places into the sea, namely Malwani, Versova, Mahim Causeway (Bandra Reclamation) & Colaba. The STP project is based on ‘Rotating Media Biological Reactor (RMBR)’, which treats and reuses the waste water for purposes like horticulture, cleaning of public places and other non-drinking and non-domestic purposes for which otherwise fresh water is being used. This fully funded initiative by HCCBPL will help in conserving fresh water. Naik Environ has executed the project.

Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Irial Finan said, “This partnership involving HCCBPL and MCGM further reiterates our belief that for a subject as critical as water, the private sector, government agencies  and civil society have to come together and work towards a common goal – that of water stewardship. To address future challenges, wider collaboration with stakeholders on common issues such as environment, water, employment and inclusive growth is expected from responsible business establishments.  Partnerships like these – what we like to call the Golden Triangle – will help address tomorrow’s challenges. Today’s dedication is a clear indication that the Company remains committed to engaging with stakeholders across the country for our mutual growth and development”

Speaking on the occasion, Shri. Subhash Desai said that this initiative is a very good example of public-private partnership. He thanked MCGM and HCCBPL for joining hands for this project. Water is a very scarce common resource and hence it is a collective responsibility of all stakeholders to work together.

In the true spirit of partnership, HCCBPL has funded the installation of STP based on ‘Rotating Media Biological Reactor (RMBR)’, its operation as well as maintenance for the first three months. MCGM will be responsible for subsequent operation, maintenance and usage of the water.

Litter not only looks bad but also has an adverse effect on the environment. Littering sends out a negative message to children and the next generation that it is acceptable behavior to throw your trash anywhere mindless of the environment. Parle Products has taken the initiative to set the course for our community and raise awareness with the positive messaging of its Litter Free Campaign.

Armed with this objective, Parle Products has launched the first phase of the Litter Free campaign across the country through a series of Television Commercials. The commercials are set in a series of everyday scenarios that viewers can identify with and encourage them to “Show Garbage Its Place”.

Speaking about the campaign, Mr. Shalin Desai, Dy Marketing Manager, Parle Products said, “We intend to spread a positive message with the Parle Litter Free initiative and encourage citizens to make a conscious effort to keep their environment clean. Our combined efforts will not only make a difference to the mindset of consumers but also instill a productive commitment.  We are also happy to extend our efforts to the nation in line with the ‘Swaccha Bharat Abhiyan’ launched by our PM.”

Previously, Parle Products had associated the campaign with Indian festivals and successfully spread the Litter Free message at Raas Garba and Jagadhatri Puja in West Bengal.

SAANS from Bangalore (Winner), Godavari Women Weaver’s Services Producer Company (GWWSPC) from Mandapeta, Andhra Pradesh (1^st Runners-up) and Ultrasafe Ultrasound from Kolkata (2^nd Runners-up) emerged as the top three most promising social ventures, winning prize money of Rs. 2 lakhs, Rs. 1.5 lakhs and Rs. 1.25 lakhs, respectively. In a first, during the grand finale ceremony, the 2nd Runners-up team,Ultrasafe Ultra Sound, received on-the-spot seed funding Rs. 500,000 plus technical support by Glocal Healthcare Systems (P) Ltd., a West Bengal based healthcare company.

Khalid Abdullah Quidwai, the winner of the Tata Social Enterprise Challenge 2014-15 has developed SAANS, a low cost and easy to use mechanical device to help keep the lungs of newborns open during troubled breathing. Exhilarated with his win Khalid said, “Tata Social Enterprise Challenge is a great platform to showcase our venture and what we are working for. Getting our concept validated in front of esteemed judges is great motivation for us.”

Vijayan Switha Gandhi, founder of GWWSPC, who was declared as the 1st Runner-up, has developed a business model to strengthen the weaver base by collectivisation and integrating the entire value chain involved in the handloom process. Explaining further, she said, “When I started my work, I got support from Sir Ratan Tata Trust, and since then it has been a long and difficult but fruitful journey. Today, my journey has come to a full circle. I stand here receiving recognition on a Tata platform for a model, created by my team, the seed for which was a grant from Tata’s. I feel very happy and motivated.”

The 2^nd Runners-up, Abhishek Biswas and Aditya Pangte, have developed Ultrasafe Ultra Sound, which uses a patented technology that automatically prevents the identification of genitalia in live images produced by ultrasound machines. Talking about their project, they said, “Tata Social Enterprise Challenge is the biggest platform for social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurship is ignored if we compare it to the mainstream entrepreneurship. This is a great validation of our idea and further motivates us to do better. Thank you Tata and IIM Calcutta.”

The ceremony featured special talks by Mr. Anshu Gupta, Founder Goonj, Dr. S.P. Gon Chaudhuri, founder of India’s first renewable energy college – NB Institute for Rural Development (NBIRT), Dr.Sabahat Azim, Founder Glocaland Dr. N.S. Rajan, Member – Group Executive Council and Chief Group Human Resources Officer, Tata Sons. Speaking on the occasion, Prof. Ashok Banerjee, Dean (New Initiatives and External Relations), IIM Calcutta, said, “The 3rd edition of Tata Social Enterprise Challenge has been important in terms of both the quality and the quantity of impact proposals received. We are extremely happy to note that this national level contest is eagerly awaited by aspiring social entrepreneurs. The on-the-spot announcement of seed funding to one of the winners of the contest goes a long way to prove the potential of this platform.”

Felicitating the winners, Dr. N.S. Rajan, Member – Group Executive Council and Chief Group Human Resources Officer, Tata Sons said, “In its third year, Tata Social Enterprise Challenge has grown into a single platform to catalyse new and promising sustainable ventures, build an enabling ecosystem for these ventures to convert their ideas into sustainable impact, create awareness of the social entrepreneurship field, and educate and mentor future champions of change. We are delighted to have IIM – Calcutta as a partner. Their expertise and mentoring proves extremely valuable in making this initiative a success. In line with the Tata group’s ethos of giving back to the society, the group through this platform endeavours to encourage innovative ideas and talent that will help in bringing about a change for the larger good of society. It is heartening to see the passion that these entrepreneurs have to make a difference and we wish them the very best of luck.”

Tata Social Enterprise Challenge 2014-15 kicked-off on August 25, 2014 and invited social entrepreneurs who either had an early stage venture (not older than 3 years) or a promising idea with a plan that could create sustainable social impact in India. Impact Proposals (detailed Business Plans) were invited in the areas of education, health, agriculture, technology, sanitation, and handicrafts, among others.

Apart from the top 3 winning ventures, the 7 ventures that have made it to the top 10 finalists are, Nyayika, Leaps & Bounds, Tinker Tank, Centre for Social Consulting India Pvt. Ltd, Sukhibhava, Autoraja Mobility Solutions Pvt. Ltd, and Future Society. The ventures were judged on three parameters – Business Model, Social Impact and Sustainability. All the top 20 teams have been mentored by Ashoka Innovators for the Public and Villgro, and the IIM Calcutta faculty. The social VC partners of the initiative were Acumen, Ankur Capital, Yunus SocialBusiness and Ennovent. The teams also had an opportunity to network with mentors, experts and fellow social entrepreneurs.

For more details and updates on the ‘Tata Social Enterprise Challenge, please log ontohttp://www.tatasechallenge.org/