Contribution of reporting frameworks for the accountability for sustainability - The case of GRI and CDP and the UN Goal 6 –Clean water and sanitation

Abstract

In 2018, the General Assembly of United Nations issued the Resolution 71/222 that proclaims the period from 2018 to 2028 the International Decade for Action, “Water for Sustainable Development”, to further improve cooperation, partnership and capacity development in response to the 2030 Agenda. This resolution defines different objectives and streams of works being one of them the accountability for sustainability. Still, issues related to water are receiving increasingly attention by stakeholders, governments and companies that are being called on to improve water resources management and to disclose reliable information about it. Therefore, we choose the water as our issue and United Nations SDG 6 for our research, and to respond to these new challenges we define two objectives: first, we analyse whether the articulation between the water reporting frameworks (CDP and GRI) and SDG 6 contributes for an effective accountability for sustainability, i.e., whether the reporting frameworks have an important role as key players for the achievement of global sustainable goals; second, we analyse how companies incorporate SDGs into their annual reporting and the evolution of corporate disclosure about the contribution to SDGs in their annual reporting. To achieve the first objective, we evaluate if companies ranking in the CDP water A list improve the level of compliance with GRI after the definition of UN SDGs. We fulfil the second objective with a qualitative analysis of the annual and sustainability reports of the companies, between 2016 and 2018, that has scored in CDP water A list. This paper contributes to research on water reporting and to the understanding of the companies' sustainability reporting practices. This paper also contributes to the accounting academic engagement, to stakeholders’ comprehension of sustainability information and to the certification entities, regulators, governments and other entities, who are engaged in preparation of conceptual frameworks for climate and water reporting and in achieving UN SDG’s.