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Ensure Honest Accounting
Current accounting systems fail to value environmental and social factors in business decision-making. Investors and companies too often “externalize,” or ignore, the ecological and human impacts from their activity. As a result, companies are able to exploit finite water resources at minimal cost and emit carbon freely. We must ensure that capital markets integrate the full costs of environmental and social factors in business strategies, risk management and public disclosure. Achieving this will ensure companies are rewarded for strong sustainable performance.
Current accounting systems fail to value environmental and social factors in business decision-making. Investors and companies too often “externalize,” or ignore, the ecological and human impacts from their activity. As a result, companies are able to exploit finite water resources at minimal cost and emit carbon freely.
Ceres is working to ensure that capital markets integrate the full costs of environmental and social factors in business strategies, risk management and public disclosure. Achieving this will ensure companies are rewarded for strong sustainable performance.
How We'll Get There:
- Propel all companies to use a carbon ‘shadow’ price in capital investment decision-making and to share that information with investors.
- Ensure all analysts, rating agencies and financial firms are factoring environmental, social and governance risks and opportunities in their research and valuations.
- Integrate sustainability factors, such as water availability, forest protection and human rights, into company and investment decision-making.
- Embed sustainability factors into the disclosure requirements of key capital market drivers such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, New York Stock Exchange and Financial Accounting Standards Board.
Resources
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The Road to 2020: Corporate Progress on the Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability
Apr 25, 2012
- The Road to 2020: Corporate Progress on The Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability (www.ceres.org/roadto2020) assesses how U.S. businesses are progressing on sustainability and uses as a framework, The 21st Century Corporation: The Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability—a guide for integrating sustainability across a company’s entire enterprise. Specifically, it evaluates where 600 large publicly traded companies1 stand on sustainability issues in terms of governance, stakeholder engagement, disclosure and performance.
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2012 Investor Summit on Climate Risk & Energy Solutions - Final Report
Apr 05, 2012
- The fifth Investor Summit on Climate Risk & Energy Solutions was held on January 12th, 2012, at United Nations headquarters. Co-hosted by the United Nations Foundation, the United Nations Office for Partnerships and Ceres, the Summit brought together more than 450 institutional investor, financial and corporate leaders from around the globe. The Summit showcased a wide range of investment opportunities in climate and energy solutions – in energy efficiency, water efficiency, renewable energy and more – that are positioned to achieve significant growth and scale while replacing outmoded technologies and business models.
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Sustainability: Ending the ‘Tyranny of Short-Termism’
Apr 14, 2011
- The business case for acting on sustainability is compelling. A recent MIT Sloan/Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study divides surveyed companies into “embracers,” those actively integrating sustainability into their core business strategies, and “cautious adopters” who see sustainability as “essential to remaining competitive” but lag on core integration.
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The Ripple Effect: Water Risk in the Municipal Bond Market
Oct 22, 2010
- October 2010 - Growing water scarcity in many parts of the United States is a hidden financial risk for investors who buy the water and electric utility bonds that finance much of the country's vast water and power infrastructure, according to this first-ever report by Ceres and Water Asset Management. The report evaluates and ranks water scarcity risks for public water and power utilities in some of the country's most water-stressed regions, including Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas and Atlanta.
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Canada's Oil Sands: Shrinking Window of Opportunity
May 14, 2010
- May 2010 - This report examines how carbon and land reclamation regulations, climate change and other environmental and social issues may adversely affect the future of oil sands development in Alberta.
