Integrated Reporting

Integrated reporting can be an effective vehicle to demonstrate a company’s SDG-aligned strategies and investments, support the issuance of sustainable finance products, and provides an effective investor-communication platform, with information customized for specific audiences while maintaining a consistent message.

Specifically, integrated reporting can support companies incommunicating with a broad range of stakeholders about the:

  • integrated concepts of value creation for the enterprise and the SDG
  • financial impact of SDG-aligned strategy
  • sustainability impact of SDG-aligned strategy
  • coherence of financial and SDG materiality
  • reliability of material SDG data at the same level as financial data
Integrated reporting can be helpful because it forces companies to seriously consider the connectivity between financial and sustainability issues. It also promotes integrated thinking that ensures that the entire strategy is premised on each individual employee understanding how the business model is defined, along with its impact on the SDG.

Integrated reporting provides organic, holistic information to the market, the authorities, and the public. It involves broader and more transparent and responsible reporting of corporate performance so that stakeholders will have a more detailed view of the opportunities and risks faced by a company.

The primary purpose of integrated reporting is to explain to providers of capital how an entity creates, preserves, or erodes value over time (see Figure below).

Source: Impact Management Project