Discuss the role that Corporate Social Reporting (sustainability reporting) plays in adding value to the Annual Report. Your answer could consider why organisations have chosen to disclose sustainability information when there is no legal requirement to do so, and how Sustainability Reports have developed in recent years.

Whatever name they go by, corporate social responsibility reports are attempting to serve one essential purpose: they portray the relationship between a corporation and society. They seek to improve communications between the corporate world and the broader society within which companies report.

The concept of corporate social responsibility first surfaced in the 1970s as both companies and governments began to look beyond financial performance, for a more comprehensive understanding of the company’s long-term value-creating potential. In subsequent years, a number of high-profile disasters, such as the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in India brought the issue of corporate accountability and transparency to center stage.
Following a series of other disasters involving corporate giants like Shell with its human rights violations in Nigeria and Exxon Valdez spill in the 1990s firm stakeholders and indeed the wider public started asking what the price of doing business was…was it enough to round of a year of negative publicity by a bottom line figure?

Environmentalists and human rights activists were particularly critical of the human rights violations of Shell headquartered in Netherlands and its neo-colonialists business tendencies in Nigeria that led to the hanging of 9 human rights proponents in Ogoni in 1995. Particularly damaging was that many world figures appealed for clemency after judgement was delivered by the draconian government believed to be fully in cohorts with Shell. Some investors as well as the public temporarily lost