The Brazilian Phenomenon

20 Jul 2010 – Jean-Philippe Renaut

SustainAbility is once again assessing the state of corporate sustainability reporting, as part of its Global Reporters program. Reporting, one of our research priorities, is a great tool to achieve robust corporate accountability, and accountability is a key attribute of a sustainable world. In its ninth edition, the program is looking (for the second time) at reporting in Brazil.

2006 was the last year the Global Reporters program was truly global, as the effort to credibly identify the 50 “reporting leaders” amongst 5000+ reports became an impossible task. We would have had to rely too much on a jury’s perception, votes or other popularity contest to trim down the numbers. Therefore in 2008, along with our brilliant partners FBDS, we focused on Brazil, publishing The Road to Credibility.

We started Global Reporters 2010 back in 2009, and I met the FBDS team last week in Rio de Janeiro for a few days of work, planning and discussions. Rio, the beautiful city of contrast. Contrast between sea and mountains, urban jungle and tropical forest, well-travelled young polyglots and taxi drivers who don’t understand French, English nor my poor Spanish.

Why Brazil? Because its economy is booming (allowing us to find willing sponsors), its sustainability movement is growing (with nearly a two-fold increase in companies reporting on sustainability) and it has always been a market where SustainAbility has had interests (especially now that it will host the 2014 World Cup).

And so we’re back. Road to Credibility 2010 will be launched in Sao Paolo in late October. The report will highlight contrasts between 2008 and 2010, assess any improvement in quality of information and engagement and identify the Top 10 reporters. The process of looking at a couple of dozen companies will identify new best practices in reporting. But we especially hope that focusing on the Top 10 will stir the competitive spirit and raise the bar on the quality of reporting.

And the Brazilians sure have a competitive spirit! This study will comment on the recent Brazilian phenomenon in winning sustainability awards. Despite not winning the World Cup, Brazilians have won some of the top sustainability awards this year: the GRI Readers’ Choice Award, the CorporateRegisters Readers Awards and the Financial Times Sustainable Banking Awards. To the slight embarrassment of organisers and jury members, Brazilians this year are everywhere.

To tell you the truth, I don’t care about the awards. Ultimately we want to improve actual sustainability performance. That’s the only reason we are still in this game. So expect an incisive analysis of where Brazilian reporting succeeds, fails, and what the rest of the world can learn about it.