The initial findings of the project point to one overarching conclusion: most companies acknowledge in their reports the importance of environmental and social issues, but more often than not this information is not clear enough in terms of concrete issues, targets and principal risks. This year, the project has assessed over 100 companies from the sectors of Energy & Resource Extraction, Information and Communication Technologies, and Health Care...

Most relevant findings:

• Climate change:
  • 90% of companies report on climate change, but merely 47% specify clearly what precisely their policy has been designed to achieve and how...
• Social and employee issues:
  • There is a gap between the number of companies providing information on anti-discrimination or equal opportunities policies [...] and the disclosure of the effects of these policies...
  • Very few companies include outsourced workers in their perspective...
  • Similarly, only 10% of companies report on the living wage and very few disclose country-by-country information on region-sensitive issues such equal opportunities (6%) and freedom of association (10%)...
• Human rights:
  • Over 90% of companies express in their reports a commitment to respect human rights and 70% endeavour to ensure the protection of human rights in their supply chains as well.
  • However, only 36% describe their human rights due diligence system, 26% provide a clear statement of salient issues and 10% describe examples or indicators of effective management of those issues.
  • Companies commonly report information about human rights audits (58%), but the disclosure of results of these audits is far less common (25%) as is disclosure of the actions consequently taken (16%). Similarly, only 8% of companies discuss the limitations of the audits...