We looked at whether the firms: • Mentioned impacts on any of the nine impact categories • Provided measurement across the categories • Provided targets for impacts Where an impact was not relevant to a sector, it was excluded from our analysis. UNEXPECTED ABSENCES Once this analysis was complete, we found three important results. Firstly, energy utilisation was the category where mentions, measurement and targets were most prominent. This was ‘good news’, but there were also problems with these disclosures. We were concerned by the large array of different indicators used in this category, which hampers how we compare companies. While individual organisations are likely to be facing particular circumstances (and hence we might expect some variability in the measurements used), the diversity of indicators was larger than predicted. Secondly, in terms of how companies mention their impacts, there was a degree of overlap between impacts that were relevant for sectors and those mentioned. That being said, only 55% of the companies surveyed mentioned impacts that would be relevant to their operations (taking out the effect of energy utilisation disclosures). This means that there are important gaps in corporate disclosures. Finally, despite all sectors being impactful on marine habitats, only about half of the reports provided data on this impact. This suggests that biodiversity knowledge, action and reporting is lagging behind other forms of reporting. To help remedy this shortfall, we outlined examples of corporate nature disclosure frameworks that would support future corporate reporting. PROACTIVE SUPPORT Our work combined ecological and management science insights, allowing us to identify an absence of reporting where we might expect companies to have impacts. This creates the opportunity to work with corporations to help them understand how they might articulate their impacts, as well as how to measure these aspects and set targets for improvement. Likewise, those who own, fund or engage with these businesses might also be educated about what they should be concerned about with respect to the impact of these firms. We want to move beyond ‘wagging fingers’ at companies about nondisclosure and instead develop a resource that can help a proactive and interested company move forward with understanding and reporting their sustainability impacts. The other aspect underpinning the work is the belief (based on decades of evidence in accounting research) that what a company says about itself will have impacts on future actions. This is often described as ‘information governance’, and while this approach has limitations with respect to how powerful it can be for incentivising corporate action, it is part of a wider grouping of tools that help companies to be accountable for their impacts. Our research raises the possibility that companies in the various sectors are often using the same ocean space and hence there is the challenge and opportunity of how a group of companies might share responsibility for what happens in the ocean. FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 41 Professor Jan Bebbington is the Rubin Chair in Sustainability in Business in the Department of Accounting and Finance, and Director of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business. The paper Identifying and closing gaps in corporate reporting of ocean impacts, by Dr Jean Baptise Jouffray, of Stanford University; Dr John Virdin, of Duke University; Professor Jan Bebbington, of Lancaster University Management School; Dr Robert Blasiak, of Stockholm Resilience Centre; Andrea Dunchus, Marta Lo Presti, Dr Jeremy Pare, Juan Quintero, Regan Rosenthal, and Dr Daniel Vermeer, of Duke University; Daniel Prosi, of the European University Institute; and Piera Tortora, of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, is published in Nature Sustainability. j.bebbington1@lancaster.ac.uk
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