Sustainability and the United Nation’s Environmental Programme (UNEP) have collaborated on myriad programs and publications since 1994. This pathbreaking partnership has focused primarily on corporate sustainability reporting, and ranged across other aspects of the corporate accountability agenda including materiality, stakeholder engagement and supply chain practices.

UNEP has been SustainAbility’s main partner in the flagship Global Reporters Program, which has been central to the advancement of corporate reporting best practice worldwide. The program has pushed and guided hundreds of corporations towards greater transparency regarding better disclosure of environmental, social and economic risks and opportunities.

The Global Reporters Benchmark Methodology was developed in 1994. From 1994 to 1998, it applied to environmental reporting only, then broadened to cover triple bottom line or sustainability reporting from 2000. The key feature of the program was a bi-annual global ranking of the best reporters. In 2008, we discontinued the general global ranking in order to explore reporting best practice in a particularly dynamic region. We published The Road to Credibility: A survey of sustainability reporting in Brazil in 2008 and will follow this with a second survey on reporting best practice in Brazil in 2010. SustainAbility and UNEP also have published analyses of sustainability performance in the healthcare & life sciences, energy & utilities, media & entertainment and transportation industries.

To further support company efforts to improve sustainability-related transparency and performance, we created the Engaging Stakeholders Program with UNEP as well. Since 1998, Engaging Stakeholders has been the leading forum of its kind – in which corporate members frankly exchange ideas and best practice, and get expert guidance, coaching and consulting from the SustainAbility team, on all aspects of corporate accountability.