‘Aggregated reporting’makes its first show

Several small Chilean companies have come together to publish a sustainability report in which each in turn outlines its social and environmental impacts.

The document, in Spanish and English, is the world’s first ‘aggregated’ sustainability report, and is being cited as the way forward for small and medium-sized enterprises that otherwise struggle to find the resources to produce individual reports.

The Global Reporting Initiative, which advised the companies, says that small businesses in India and Europe have expressed interest in doing something similar.

The 40-page Chilean document, issued in pdf and hard copy form, was written by four fruit and wine producers from the Maipo region near Santiago under the banner of Valle del Maipo Ltd, a private company they set up in order to export and report under a single name. In the report each partner outlines their sustainability performance, with some shared data. Work by the consultancy Vincular, part of Chile’s Pontifical Catholic University, enabled the companies to measure their social and environmental impacts and was partly financed by the Inter-American Development Bank.

Leontien Plugge, the GRI’s small business and supply chain programme manager, said that by working together the companies had been able to address common problems such as the use of temporary labour and to benchmark their efforts, and this had ‘helped to bring everyone’s performance level up’.

The businesses have presented the report on sales tours to Germany and Spain to promote business with European supermarkets. ‘They’ve found it helps them to access foreign as well as financial markets’, said Plugge. ‘That was one reason they decided to publish in English and Spanish.’

However, Plugge said the data provided by the companies was not always comparable. A debate was also needed on ‘whether companies report as one voice in an aggregated report, or whether each company has a separate space in the document’.

Vincular said aggregated reports are likely to become increasingly popular because they allow small businesses ‘to facilitate a certain level of transparency without prohibitively burdening individual companies’ – and because they give others a better view of the social and environmental impacts of small businesses.

‘While individually these companies’ impacts may be very small, when you’re looking at clusters of companies, then their overall impacts can be quite large and are more easily measured,’ Plugge told EP. ‘You get a better understanding of the impact of small businesses throughout a region or sector.’

The GRI wants to encourage more aggregated reporting, especially in emerging economies, where small enterprises account for a large proportion of business activity but have difficulty finding the resources to report on their activities.

The GRI emphasizes that such reporting is likely to work best if the companies are all in the same sector or geographical region – or ideally both, as in the Chile case.