Disclosure and reporting against the sustainable development goals: Connecting new stakeholders to sustainability data

This case study focuses on the disclosures of thirty seven companies and a unique research approach to making their corporate sustainability performance more open, comparable and engaging. A group of 40 students at the University of Wollongong worked in a structured way to aggregate comparable data on corporate sustainability on a selection of metrics related to the SDGs. This report offers an in depth look at one example of the kind of projects that WikiRate and the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) have been running since 2016, involving more than 2,000 students. For this case study, WikiRate staff reviewed and verified the data collected by the student group on a sub-set of 22 of the Metrics they had been researching. This data covered the 37 companies’ public disclosures across two years of reporting. This report aims to give insight into the needs of researchers and other disregarded corporate sustainability data stakeholders, and to provide recommendations for ways in which reporting can be transformed to improve accessibility and engagement. In addition, the newly opened data sets provide the basis for analysis and interpretation of corporate disclosures against the Sustainable Development Goals, and a glimpse into the current landscape of open ESG information.