Green Reporting Takes Root

Source: CFO.com, 2 June 2017

As more investors link sustainability with alpha, they press issuers for meaningful environmental and social disclosures.

In its most recent 10-K filing, Host Hotels & Resorts included two charts showing energy and water use at its properties over the prior three years. Each chart showed steep descents in the company’s consumption of those resources. The disclosure, and the circumstances leading up to it, were unusual in at least two respects.

One was that the company, a publicly traded real estate investment trust (REIT), reported those numbers in its financials at all. Indeed, in the fiscal-year 2015 annual reports of the 10 companies with the largest revenue in each of 79 industries, only 19% of about 4,000 possible sustainability disclosure entries were reported as metrics, according to the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board.

Read the full article by David M. Katz

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