Lessons on Corporate “Sustainability” Disclosure from Deepwater Horizon

Abstract

The BP oil spill highlighted shortcomings of current financial and sustainability reporting standards and practice. “Integrated reporting” aims to combine financial and social/environmental information into a single annual corporate report. But without more stringent standards, integrated reports would neglect substantial risks and, as BP's sustainability reports demonstrate, create false impressions of good practice.

To be of value, integration must:

Require timely disclosure of enforcement notices, orders and allegations issued by regulators.

Require disclosure of credible scientific reports and concerns indicative of potentially catastrophic risks of a company's products and activities, regardless of scientific uncertainty.

Require review and disclosures of a firm's safety culture.

Require disclosure of any facts or circumstances needed to ensure that the management's self-portrait of its sustainability strategies, goals and progress is not materially misleading.

In conducting its misleading reporting, BP largely followed Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines. GRI is soliciting input, beginning in summer 2011, on how to revise those guidelines. Since GRI may prove a leading source for sustainability disclosure rules in integrating reporting, lessons learned from the BP experience must be applied to the next GRI revisions.