Speaking of who is using the G3 Guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), CRD Analytics recently published its list of the Global 1000 Sustainable Performance Leaders and incorporated the G3 Guidelines into its analysis. See who made the top ten and the method behind the ranking.
According to the SocialFunds.com press release, Merck is ranked first among the 1,000 sustainable performance leader companies, up from fourth in 2008. The article also pointed out that Merck achieved their highest ESG ranking the year in which it acquired Schering-Plough, the merger of which resulted in the layoff of 16,000 workers, while Fred Hassan, the CEO of Schering-Plough at the time, earned nearly $50 million. Ouch! Does this call into question the ranking criteria? I would like to hear your thoughts.
The methodology behind the rankings is a force-rank by total Sustainable Performance Value (SPV) calculated as the average of four performance dimensions: financial, environmental, social and governance among companies who meet the following criteria: a company must be publicly traded on a major global exchange; have a minimum market capitalization of $1 billion USD as of December 31st, 2009; and have produced a publicly available sustainability or corporate responsibility (CSR) report with full year environmental, social, governance (ESG) data for their 2008 calendar year before October 31st, 2009.
The top ten results are:
2 International Business Machines Corp.
I’d be interested to know how much weight is given to each of the criteria. Are we just muddying the waters of sustainability?
Wow, I live in a town (Endicott, NY) where IBM has contaminated a large portion of it with TCE. And they are number 2.
These awards seem to be based on the companies’ own report about themselves. That is no way to give away awards. I would have had straight A’s through school if it were up to me.