Historical accountability and cumulative impacts: the treatment of time in corporate sustainability reporting [An article from: Ecological Economics]

This digital document is a journal article from Ecological Economics, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Pressures on the environment resulting from corporate activities cause impacts that will occur over different time scales into the future and also have been occurring for different amounts of time in the past. The development of fair and equitable corporate sustainability reporting (CSR) initiatives requires that these temporal aspects be properly taken into account. In order to relate indicators of environmental pressure to indicators of environmental state changes, time scales specific to that pressure should be used. We review the different ways in which temporal aspects have been dealt with in CSR and other reporting schemes and show that there is often no consistent and rigorous treatment of time. We discuss several obstacles that may have impeded the appropriate treatment of time in CSR so far and suggest that these issues must be resolved as CSR becomes more widely adopted.