The public reaction to BP's Sustainability Review, published last week, is: silence. Hardly anyone has responded to the gross failure of a report at all, with the exception of Good Magazine which noted its omission of oil spill volume estimates early on.
Why? The CSR community sure was vocal enough in the aftermath of Gulf of Mexico last year, offering up a chorus of timidly critical voices, most of which were aimed at the lame question 'whenceforth for BP's reputation'.
Perhaps the lack of chorus this time is because this sustainability report gets at a hard reality about reporting in general: as it stands, reporting is pretty useless. The purpose of CSR reporting is supposedly to improve performance by creating accountability for social and environmental impacts that aligns with financial impacts.
So if causing the biggest environmental disaster in the history of the US doesn't prevent BP from publishing a report which offers up little to no detail on what the actual impact was, and how their sustainability 'strategy' will change to reflect this, there's no point in reporting at all.
Then again, financial reporting ain't so great either...
No comments:
Post a Comment