Amsterdam has become the first capital city in the world to produce a stand-alone sustainability report.
The city authority has published the report online in Dutch and also as
a hard copy summary in English. It intends to produce a regular
dedicated report in the future.
Mayor Job Cohen said the authority had been encouraged to do so when it
learnt it would host the Global Reporting Initiative’s first full-scale
conference, held in October. However, local politicians felt it had
anyway become ‘obligatory for an organization of our size’ to state its
social and environmental impacts and to follow the lead given by
business.
There is little data in the report, which concentrates on describing recycling, energy-use, transport and community projects.
Stand-alone sustainability reporting by public authorities is still
rare. One of the pioneers is Greater Vancouver District in Canada, but
Lynda King, who led the work there, said the public sector ‘is often
very risk-averse about making information generally available’. She
added: ‘Despite the value of reporting it’s still very difficult to get
the public sector to go down that avenue.’
Robyn Leeson, sustainability manager at the Melbourne city government
in Australia, which is currently producing its first dedicated
sustainability report and has previously incorporated social and
environmental indicators into its annual statement, said authorities
often failed to appreciate the benefits. She said Melbourne believed
its reporting would retain and attract staff and was a good way of
presenting what politicians have achieved. However, she pointed out
that, with limited budgets, public bodies should ‘start out modestly
and keep it small’ and not emulate multinationals. Melbourne has sought
‘to get away from the notion that the city can produce a report like
BHP Billiton every year’.
In the UK, few local authorities publish stand-alone sustainability
reports, although Wolverhampton city council did so for the first time
in September 2006.
Judith Moore, senior environmental specialist at the World Bank, which
has produced two ‘accountability reports’, warned that many public
bodies are deterred from doing so because they already ‘suffer from
reporting fatigue in other areas’.
