ACCA has promoted greater transparency in the reporting of organisations' social and environmental impacts for over fifteen years. ACCA is involved in reporting awards in more than 20 countries in Europe, Africa, North America/Canada and the Asia Pacific region.
ACCA Awards around the world reward companies for excellence in environmental, social and sustainability reporting. The aim of our Awards is to identify and reward innovative attempts to communicate corporate performance, although we do not comment on performance itself. Our main aim is to reward transparency.
In Pakistan, ACCA Pakistan along with WWF Pakistan launched ACCA-WWF Pakistan Environmental Reporting Awards in 2002. This was a challenging initiative the success of which depended upon the successful buy in of the business community.
The response of the business community towards our awards has been pleasing.
In the last five years the quality and quantity of environmental reports submitted by local listed, multinational and local unlisted companies has improved commendably. Due to the exceptional quality of sustainability reports submitted by multinationals and local listed companies, from 2006 onwards we will be rewarding companies not only for environmental reporting but also for sustainability reporting.
Sustainability Reporting is the process for publicly disclosing an organisation's environmental, social and economic performance. The term sustainability reporting is also referred to as triple bottom line reporting.
The rise of sustainability reporting can be attributed to the changing nature of the business world. As the importance of ensuring transparency, responsibility and accountability in business activities becomes paramount, the demand for public information about how organisations conduct their business in terms of sustainable development becomes greater.
Sustainability reporting provides a framework to businesses for communicating environmental, economic and social performance to its stakeholders thus acknowledging its responsibility for its impact on society and environment; while being accountable to its stakeholders.
The benefits of a high quality environmental, social and sustainability report include demonstrating corporate responsibility, creating opportunity to engage with stakeholders, establishing benchmarks to improve environmental and social performance, enhancing reputation and competitive advantage, facilitating access to capital or buyers' list of preferred suppliers, improving access to international export markets and reducing the risk of regulatory intervention.
We at ACCA Pakistan are committed to work in public interest and build the capacity of the business community so as to ensure transparency in reporting and help he business community reap the benefits of environmental and sustainability reports.
We will be holding a number of information sessions about the Pakistan Environmental Reporting Awards as to create awareness of best practices for developing environmental, social and sustainability reports. We hope to see you all at the information sessions planned for July 2007 and also sincerely hope that the quantity of high quality environmental, social and sustainability reports will increase in the future.
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