Sustainability reporting for large public companies around the world has become the norm. Si2’s research this year (2018) found that 78 percent of the S&P 500 issued a sustainability report for the most recent reporting period, most with environmental and social performance metrics. The rate of sustainability reporting for the world’s largest companies is even higher, with some figures noting as high as 93 percent. [1] This is a starkly different picture from the 1980s, when a handful of companies in vulnerable sectors—extractives and chemicals, which had to respond to public backlash against environmental mishaps—were the only ones to publish environmental reports with limited performance metrics. It was not until the 1990s that sustainability reports as we know them today started gaining traction, after the concept of “triple bottom line”—environmental, social and economic—corporate performance was introduced and became popular.

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