Post Date: 23 November 2022

Measuring Corporate Sustainability with Impact Assessment and its Implication for Sustainability Reporting Development

Abstract:

The growing trends in Corporate Sustainability have raised concerns in the development of sustainability reporting and how non-financial indicators are measured. With the concept of Sustainable Development being applied in the business context, certain ideologies and terms have been concurrently developed, including Corporate Sustainability (CS), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Creating Shared Value (CSV), and Environment, Social and Governance (ESG).   Although similar, these terms are not equal and this should not be used interchangeably. To attain CS and fulfill the more stringent requirement on sustainability reporting, companies need to formulate sustainability strategies to ensure their ESG performances are robust. Apart from delivering traditional financials returns, companied are required to report on the non-financial impact derived from their business operations. This raised the need for and importance of impact measurement on the non-financial items, which enables holistic reporting on economic and socio-environmental values. In this research, Link Asset Management Limited (Link) is selected as the case study. Being a property management company, Link has a large portfolio of retail, offices, car parks and logistics across Hong Kong, Mainland China, Australia and the United Kingdom (UK). This report illustrates the development of CS at Link, and mainly discusses the quantification method of Total Impact Assessment (TIA) in measuring the socio-environmental impact of its community projects. The assessment result also led to a discussion on having prudent metrics and proxies selection to minimise the risk of over-estimation. Despite the impact assessment for socio-environmental impact is still immature, this research aims to serve as the first attempt to introduce an actual measurement method at Link and contributes to further research in this field for methodology development.