Business News
Dow Achieves Highest Marks For Sustainability Progress and Reporting
Thursday 18. September 2008 - The Dow Chemical Company today issued its 2007 Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Report with UN Global Compact Communication on Progress, available at dow.com. The Report earned Dow an "A+" from the GRI.
Dow utilizes GRIs reporting guidelines to communicate the Companys sustainability efforts and achievements. This report presents a consistent and balanced summary of Dows progress against sustainability issues and challenges facing the Company and underscore Dows fundamental commitments.
The GRI report is the most widely used sustainability reporting framework that includes the principles and indicators that global organizations use to measure and report economic, environmental, and social performance. This years report is the fifth GRI report Dow has submitted since reporting began in 2003 and the first year Dow received an A+.
The “A” signifies the completeness of report, based on the topics described in the GRI reporting guidelines, and the “+” denotes that the completeness of the report was verified by an external third-party. An increasingly common step in GRI reporting, external third-party verification increases stakeholder confidence in the accuracy of the report.
“In an increasingly competitive industry, our customers, partners and investors want to know what our goals are, the progress were making against them and the challenges we are facing related to sustainability,” said Neil Hawkins, Dows vice president of sustainability. “Our transparency around sustainability – including our GRI reporting and our very public 2015 Sustainability Goals – underscore our commitment to progress in this area. We are delighted that this transparency is well received and that our progress can be publicly tracked against these important goals.”
Additionally, Dow integrated into the GRI its first UN Global Compact Communication on Progress (COP) a year ahead of schedule to show the Companys strong commitment to the principles of the Compact and its role as a global corporate citizen. In 2007, Dow became a member of the UN Global Compact, the world’s largest voluntary corporate citizenship initiative comprised of more than 4,000 companies from more than 120 countries. Through this commitment, Dow agrees to embrace, support and enact a set of core values in the areas of human rights, labor standards, the environment and anti-corruption – and report Company advancements through an annual COP. Communicating this progress with stakeholders is one step in the continuous cycle of putting the values and ideas of the ten universal principles into action.