SustainabilityHQ.com Weekly Highlights

All news/all the time -- that was the American television viewer's diet of content during the week long siege, with Hurricane Harvey sweeping ashore along the Gulf of Mexico areas of the State of Texas. And the plight of the people of the Houston region, in particular, was on everyone's mind as we watched the struggles of the residents there to stay safe and help their neighbors.

For the past 25 and more years, the focus of the sustainable & responsible investment (SRI) community has been on matters related to corporate compensation, usually a corporate governance concern, as well as additional concerns on a range of other issues and topic areas (in environmental, social/societal, and other categories).

We Americans are fond of putting specific age cohorts in neatly assembled descriptors -- the Silent Generation; the Greatest Generation; the Baby Boom Generation; Gen X and Gen Y. Now in focus: The Millennial Generation, fast approaching the vaunted celebrity status of the post-WW II Baby Boom Generation.

Is corporate growth and profitability "hard wired" to sustainability and trust? Important question! The answer (a declarative "yes") was advanced by Mark Pearson and Bill Theofilou, of the Accenture consulting firm, in a recent white paper.

The G&A Institute team closely monitors US corporations included in the index (a number are clients of G&A), and analyzes the reporting practices of the constituent companies. In the first year of the study, we looked at 2010 sustainability / CSR / citizenship reporting by the S&P 500 and determined that about 20% were doing some kind of structured sustainability and related subject matter reporting. That was a good baseline year to build on, but 80% were laggards.

The next year the volume of reporting dramatically increased to more than 50% of the universe; then to three-quarters, and in our latest examination, for year 2016 the result was that 82% of the universe is reporting -- only 18% of the 500 are now laggards in this regard.

We've been sharing news and perspectives on recent developments in l'affaires climate change, with the US government [at the Federal level] abandoning the landmark Paris Agreement (the COP 21 accomplishments, with almost 200 nations participating).

All eyes were on Hamburg, Germany last week as the leaders of the "G20" nations** gathered. High on the agenda was climate change and sustainable development. Mixed messages came out of the gathering, but as Jens-Peter Saul explains in our first Top story, even if governments can't agree in such gatherings, private industry is moving forward in providing climate change solutions.

Six months ago an experienced sustainability professional assumed the CEO post -- Tim Mohin, who during his career was at US EPA, where he led the effort that led to the Clean Air Act; Apple (overseeing the company's global supply chain, "Supplier Responsibility"); Chair of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition; and Senior Director of Sustainability at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).