Developing sustainability reporting - Case Cargotec - Aaltodoc

As organisations look to validate and certify their corporate responsibility reports, external
assurance is becoming more common. Assurance can provide several benefits, including
enhanced credibility, opportunities to identify process and performance improvements, as well as
opportunities for organisations to sharpen their corporate responsibility reporting to provide
more value to management, customers, investors, and other stakeholders. (KPMG 2011)
Integrated reporting, in which corporate responsibility reporting is integrated into financial
reporting, can be seen as the next step in corporate reporting. In the preface of Tomorrow’s
Corporate Reporting by CIMA et al. (2011), professor Mervyn E. King argues that financial
reporting is no longer enough to make an informed assessment about the sustainability of a
business in the new economy in which “human resource, financial, capital, information
technology, natural capital and society are all critically interdependent and create value.” He
suggests that in the future, the annual report has to be an integrated one, with a holistic account
of the financial and non-financial performance of the company. Also in Finland the trend is
towards integrated reporting (Finnish Business & Society 2011a). The International Integrated
Reporting Committee (IIRC) was established in 2010 in order to develop a globally accepted
integrated reporting framework that combines financial, environmental, social, and governance
information in a clear, concise, consistent, and comparable format (KPMG 2011).
2.2. Content of sustainability reporting
Despite the fact that several sustainability reporting frameworks have been presented – or
because of that – there are still questions on the information the reports should include and on
how they should be structured (Davis & Searcy 2010). Although voluntary responsibility
reporting guidelines and industry best practices can be used as a starting point, there is still a lot
of discretion in determining what information to disclose (Roca & Searcy 2012).
Davis & Searcy (2010) compare previous content analyses of corporate sustainability reports.
According to their findings, there is a wide variety of perspectives on what should be included in
the reports. However, there are some similarities in terms of what the content analyses focused
on. For instance, all the studies assessed whether stakeholder relations were covered. The
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