New Research on WikiRate: Assessing European Corporate Non-Financial Reporting
A new Research Report on the climate and environmental disclosures of 300 companies from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, has recently been published by Frank Bold, a public interest law organization coordinating the Alliance for Corporate Transparency. The research was conducted to shed light on how companies report to the EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) (legislation that came into effect in 2018), and to improve climate and sustainability corporate disclosure policies to enable sustainable finance.
The Research Report found that there has been some, but insufficient progress in corporate disclosures on climate and the environment. Companies which provide sufficient information on their climate policies are still in the minority — with only 30% giving enough detail to understand their policy development, performance and impact. The majority of companies (70%) do not provide any information on their biodiversity approach while only 55% of companies disclosed a policy on pollution. The aggregated results and key findings of the research can be consulted in the public database hosted in the Alliance for Corporate Transparency.
Frank Bold has also partnered with WikiRate to make the data-set and methodology accessible through WikiRate’s open data platform, where it can be combined with other corporate ESG data to obtain additional information on company disclosure, and support further research and advocacy. Explore and compare in detail here on WikiRate.
The EU NFRD requires large companies to publish regular reports on the social and environmental risks and impacts of their activities, in order to support a wide range of stakeholders to evaluate their sustainability performance and encourage responsible business. As part of the European Commission’s process to reform the requirements, a public consultation was opened in early 2020, WikiRate submitted a contribution advocating for increased alignment on reporting obligations, for more consistent reporting and improved insights on corporate impacts.
This new Research Report is timely, given the legislation is under review, with a proposal for reform set to be presented by lawmakers early in 2021.
Combining ESG data on WikiRate
Much of the corporate Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data on the WikiRate platform looks at company performance according to particular sustainability metrics (e.g. a company’s scope 1 GHG emissions), while also mapping the gaps in reporting. The new dataset from Frank Bold and the Alliance for Corporate Transparency adds to this perspective, looking at whether and how companies report on specific climate issues, policies, risks and outcomes.
Thus, combining the Research Report dataset with data reported using the Global Reporting Initiative standards, provides insights on both how a company reports, for example, its renewable and non-renewable energy consumption and production (KPI coverage and Targets & Assurance), as well as what its actual renewable and non-renewable fuel consumption is.
Due to the Research Report’s focus on Central, Eastern and Southern European companies, the addition of this methodology and dataset brings coverage of many companies which were not previously researched on WikiRate. With this dataset comes an archive of up-to-date corporate reports which researchers can use for further research on these companies in a number of languages.
This dataset presents a significant expansion to public understanding of EU reporting and corporate policies on governance, climate and environmental issues. All the more so because Frank Bold and the Alliance have made it accessible in the public domain for others to use in future research and analysis.
