Reporting on reporting

A growing band of large companies are now producing environmental reports, and Britain leads the way in Europe on independent verification, which is used by more than half of the British companies that do report. These are the main findings of the Third International Survey of Environmental Reporting, carried out by Netherlands-based KPMG Environmental Consulting.

David Coles, head of KPMG’s Sustainability Advisory Services, finds it unsurprising that the ‘Big 5’ accountancy firms dominate the independent verification market. The traditional techniques and rigour of financial accounting, he says, are now being applied to environmental audits.

The report looks at the top Fortune 250 companies worldwide (of whom 35% now publish reports), and the top 100 companies in the USA, Australia and nine EU countries. The proportion of the latter that publish a separate CER is now 24% and rising, but almost the same number again publish their environmental information as part of another document, usually the annual report and accounts. Countries that have legislated on mandatory reporting include Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and Australia.

Meanwhile, the Federation of European Accountants (FEE) is calling for objective and consistent standards for the expert verification of CERs. It wants auditing done by multidisciplinary teams, and has come up with some draft guidelines of its own for how CERs should be presented, emphasising clarity of content and language and the use of quantifiable data.

In the UK, there’s been a coming together of three different professional organisations to create a new body, the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA). Based in Edinburgh, IEMA will be the competent body in the UK for the EU’s Eco Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS). It will concentrate on professional training and accreditation, and registration for environmental auditors and assessors.

KPMG Environmental Consulting,
+31 30 658 1801; www.kpmg.com
FEE, +32 2 285 40 85
IEMA, 0131 558 8810

  • A regular monthly briefing service on companies and their ethical performance, the Corporate Ethics Overview, has recently been launched by the Ethical Investment Research Service (EIRIS, 020 7840 5700; ethics@eiris.org). It is aimed at fund managers and investment analysts, and can alert readers to issues that might affect shareholder value. It is expected to be of particular interest to the pensions industry, in view of new regulations requiring pension funds to disclose how they take account of ethical issues.

18 October 2001