PRIZMA

 Jointly with GRI, the International Finance Corporation (IFC, part of the World Bank Group) published a bridging document showing how strategies, system and data points developed to meet IFC Performance Standards can be used to generate GRI-type sustainability reports. About time to help capital project developers/sponsors to leverage expensive compliance reporting to create more shareholder value!

Capital project sponsors seeking project finance and political risk insurance from IFC, EBRD, Equator Banks and Export Credit Agencies (such as Export Development Canada or EDC) sometimes feel the need to reach for headache pills when they commit to meeting the IFC Performance Standards and, its derivative, the Equator Principles. Heartburn treatment is sometimes added when they try to meet the associated monitoring requirements for quarterly and annual monitoring reports. The associated systems and data cost lots of time and money to produce. Given focus (tunnel vision?) on compliance with loan or subscription agreements, the systems and data sets have not been recognized as a tool to create more shareholder value for the company. But this is about to change.

When asked, I jumped at the opportunity to lead a conference break out session on sustainability reporting during IFC’s Corporate Responsibility Forum on Strategies for a Competitiveness and Shared Value (held in mid June 2010 in Washington DC). IFC distributed the fresh-off-the-press guidance note on “Getting More Value Out of Sustainability Reporting” and we had an opportunity to explore concrete case studies with the help of IFC clients, a GRI approved trainer on sustainability reporting (yours truly), and other sustainability report makers and users. Some of the examples discussed included the following:

IFC investee Dialogue, which operates in the mobile telephony sector in Sri Lanka, leveraged the systems and information being collected based on the IFC Performance Standards to generate its A-level inaugural sustainability report. Dialogue topped the country’s corporate accountability ratings for the Year 2009, in its inaugural year of publication and is recognized as Sri Lanka's most coveted brand.

Manila Water, a public private partnership which provides water and wastewater services to 5.6 million people from 23 cities and municipalities in the Philippines, used its sustainability reporting process to better articulate its sustainability strategy and performance. In 2009, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a coalition of nearly 300 faith-based institutional investors representing over $100 billion in invested capital evaluated the adequacy of environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure of 12 water utility companies and assessed how well they met investor needs. Manila Water outranked privately owned companies in the UK and US, coming third in the benchmark study -and collected other awards and recognition along the way.

Gold Reserve Inc (supported by Prizma) became the first pre-production, junior mining company listed in Canada to use and leverage its environmental and social impact assessment studies designed to meet IFC Performance Standards and Equator Principles to create an inaugural sustainability report.

Getting a ‘bigger bang for the buck’ creates shareholder value. Leveraging systems and data designed to meet IFC Performance Standards and Equator Principles can be used to produce sustainability reports. It may surprise you how little extra efforts is involved in this process…!

About the author: Mehrdad Nazari (MBA, MSc, LEAD Fellow) is a Corporate Responsibility, Sustainability Reporting & ESIA Advisor, and Director of Prizma. He was previously an environmental consultant with Dames & Moore, Principal Environmental Specialist at the EBRD and CSR Research Director at CoreRatings. Mehrdad is a GRI-approved trainer on GRI's sustainability reporting framework and a licensed AA1000 Assurance Provider.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 19th, 2010 at 9:55 am and is filed under Canadian CSR Strategy for International Extractives, Equator Principles, European Bank (EBRD) Performance Requirements, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) sustainability reporting, IFC Performance Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.