19^th International CODATA Conference
Category: Environmental Informatics

Progress in Sustainability Reporting - Reaping the Benefits of the Internet and associated Technologies

Dr. Ralf Isenmann (isenmann@bior.de)
University of Kaiserslautern, Department of Business Information Systems and Operations Research (BiOR), Germany
http://www.bior.de and http://www.nachhaltigkeitsberichterstattung.de

Corporate sustainability reporting using the Internet - especially the WWW - is a rapidly emerging and increasingly popular method. Today, sustainability online reporting has become part of the business practices and a daily affairs for a number of companies, and thus many of the communication vehicles provided for companies' key target groups, stakeholders (users) and other interested parties are available on the WWW: reports, brochures, leaflets, newsletters, press releases, slides, presentations, audio sequences, video clips etc. are accessible via download and/or online, prepared for being pulled or automatically disseminated via e-mail or other current push technologies. Despite the considerable progress companies have made in recent years however, it is not yet clear just how the field will develop and how practice could be improved. In particular, the role of the Internet as an emerging computer-based medium and its unique capabilities in form and content need to be understood better.

This paper describes how to develop from early environmental reporting stages towards the more advanced sustainability reporting, while exploiting the Internet's specific capabilities properly. This path is illustrated as a progression in reporting along three dimensions: integration of financial and social issues into environmental reporting, provision of reporting instruments on various media and fine tuning communication vehicles according to users' different needs and preferences. These trends in terms of a more balanced reporting approach, cross media availability, and customisation seem to be converging to push the field towards sustainability reporting based on the Internet as a backbone for companies' underlying ICT-infrastructure. Without support from ICT, progress in the field toward sustainability reporting is seen as quite difficult, as moving away from orthodox reporting is a complex task.