In Adding Value Through Sustainability Reporting – our latest thought leadership report to be released this week – we discuss how businesses can get the most from sustainability and corporate responsibility reporting. To give the report a little context we thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at how big sustainability reporting is globally.
Sustainability report production is tracked by a number of organisations including CorporateRegister.com. Their latest data for 2011 suggests that around 6000 non-financial reports are produced globally. Of these, about 950 are first time reports. Using these figures and our wide experience of reporting we did a simple reckoning taking into account the range of organisation sizes, the spread of common reporting formats and including a stratification for maturity of approach.
Our estimate suggests about 2.3 bn GBP (3.7 bn USD) is spent on sustainability reporting annually (at UK prices). This raises the question of the employment implications of reporting. Accepting that not all the spend goes on labour we estimated that around 20,000 people (FTE) are directly employed in sustainability reporting. Given there is a tendency for reporting to form part, rather than the whole of a job description, there could be potentially three times this number with close involvement. These reporting heroes are often poorly acknowledged for their vital role of collating, interpreting and adding value to sustainability information.
In Adding Value Through Sustainability Reporting report we take an important step on the way to revealing the full value of sustainability reporting and in so doing identifying the true impact of the hard working reporting practitioners.