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See the Greatest Hits page for a collection of publications on public reporting available on CDROM

Public Reporting of Sustainability Performance

Although some organizations are content to simply improve their own performance, most also want to let their customers and other stakeholders know how they are improving.   Public environmental and sustainability reporting is one of the fastest-growing topics in Cleaner Production today.  Many corporations are starting to put their reports on the Internet.  Studying them is an excellent way to learn how real problems are being managed, and also to obtain information about best practices in various industry sectors.  In the future, public sustainability reports that include information about cleaner production performance are likely to be expected by many governments and investors.  See the Finance page for more information about Socially Responsible Investment, which depends on public reports to help fund managers and investors make choices. 

Public reporting about pollution releases from facilities is now an important part of the environmental regulation system in many developed countries.  The World Bank has published a page of resources on these important Pollutant Release and Transfer Registries that provides the best single source for understanding the concepts.

• Public Environmental Reporting from Environment Australia is a comprehensive website about this topic with many informative articles and guidelines.
   
• CorporateRegister.Com is a new database of information about many kinds of non-financial corporate reports including sustainability and environment.
  
  
• The Global Reporting Initative is the leading international initiative developing standards for environmental and social reports.  It works in cooperation with many organizations, in particular the CERES organization which has its own standards for corporate reporting.
  
  
• The Facility Reporting Project   is a new multistakeholder initiative to develop a generally accepted framework for facility-level and site-specific environmental and social sustainability reporting.
  
  
• The Environmental Reporting Clearinghouse is the leading academic resource with information organized by country, sector, company, etc.
  
  
• International Corporate Environmental Reporting is an independent site with good resources and examples.
  
  
• Corporate Impact Reporting is a program of the UK group Business in the Community which has corporate social responsibility reports on line.
  
  
• OneReport is a comprehensive sustainability reporting solution designed to reduce reporting costs, simplify and streamline reporting process, and distribute data.