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Why reputation matters
According to Heaps, sustainability
is key to a company’s reputation for
many reasons: “If you look at the
average big company in 1980,
80 percent of its value was to do
with tangible assets. If you look at the
average big company today, it’s totally
flipped – now 80 percent of its market
value has to do with intangible assets
and a large part of intangible assets is
reputation, such as sustainability and
environmental profile, which is four
times more important than it was in
1980. It’s a lot more important in 2014
than it was back then,” he says.
n
Future disclosure trends:
Helsinki number one
“This year, Helsinki, Finland, is the
best stock exchange for disclosure
in the world,” says
Toby A.A.
Heaps
, CEO and president
of Corporate Knights, which
launched the world’s first global
corporate sustainability ranking
(Global 100 Most Sustainable
Corporations in the World) in
2005.
“We crunched the numbers
and looked at the 46 world major
stock exchanges that had more
than USD 2 billion dollars (1.55
billion euros) of trade. We looked
at what percent of companies
from each exchange are report-
ing environmental biometrics. We
discovered several surprises, for
example, China is catching up
fast on disclosure issues – and that
holds true for other parts of Asia.”
Project, a really bold initiative started
about ten years ago on a shoestring
budget by lawyer James Cameron
was key,” says Heaps. “If we can get
the largest investors in the world to
write to the biggest companies in
the world asking what their carbon
emissions are and what they are
doing about climate change, then
we have a better chance of getting
a response. The not-for-profit dedi-
cated to environmental disclosure
now sends questionnaires to com-
panies across the world on behalf of
investors with USD 87 trillion assets.
If you are a major company in the
world you do not carbon report.”
PEOPLE FLOW |
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