Sustainability Reporting Guidelines
An ever-increasing number of companies and other organizations want to make their operations sustainable. Moreover, expectations that long-term profitability should go hand-in-hand with social justice and protecting the environment are gaining ground. These expectations are only set to increase and intensify as the need to move to a truly sustainable economy is understood by companies’ and organizations’ financiers, customers and other stakeholders.
Sustainability reporting helps organizations to set goals, measure performance, and manage change in order to make their operations more sustainable. A sustainability report conveys disclosures on an organization’s impacts – be they positive or negative – on the environment, society and the economy. In doing so, sustainability reporting makes abstract issues tangible and concrete, thereby assisting in understanding and managing the effects of sustainability developments on the organization’s activities and strategy.
In this context G4 was planned and developed. The GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines are periodically reviewed to provide the best and most up-to-date guidance for effective sustainability reporting. The aim of G4, the fourth such update, is simple: to help reporters prepare sustainability reports that matter, contain valuable information about the organization’s most critical sustainability-related issues, and make such sustainability reporting standard practice.
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Indicators of Sustainable Development: Guidelines and Methodologies Third Edition
This publication presents the third set of Indicators of Sustainable Development and provides suggestions on how to adapt them to national conditions and priorities. It benefits from the active participation of and excellent collaboration with, a wide range of governments, international organizations, academic institutions, non-governmental organizations and individual experts. The indicators are a follow-up to the two earlier sets prepared under the work programme on indicators of sustainable development approved by the Commission on Sustainable Development in 1995. These earlier sets were published in 1996 and 2001.
The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 recognized the important role that indicators could play in helping countries make informed decisions concerning sustainable development. At the international level, the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) approved its Work Programme on Indicators of Sustainable Development in 1995. The first two sets of CSD Indicators of Sustainable Development (henceforth CSD indicators) were developed between 1994 and 2001. They have been extensively tested, applied and used in many countries as the basis for the development of national indicators of sustainable development.
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Unilever Sustainable Living Plan
Creating a sustainable future will require fundamental changes in attitude and behaviour across society. Governments and industry will have to change but so too will individual citizens. We all know from personal experience of losing weight or getting fit just how difficult change is. Successful change comes from a real understanding of people, their habits and their motivations. As one of the world’s leading consumer goods companies, whose products are used by two billion people every day, Unilever is constantly researching the attitudes and needs of people all around the world. We have a long history of both sustainability and the use of marketing and market research to promote behaviour change. And for the first time we are publishing our own model for effective behaviour change. We call this approach the Five Levers for Change.
The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan commits us to ambitious targets over the next decade. We intend to help more than a billion people take action to improve their health; to halve the environmental footprint of our products; and to source 100% of our agricultural raw materials sustainably.
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