The last two decades have been spent incorporating non-financial issues (environmental, social governance) into corporate disclosure procedures. This is the result of the appearance of reporting frameworks from the private sector (such as GRI, IIRC, SASB, CDP), from market regulation (such as on Integrated Reporting in South Africa, EU Directive on non-financial reporting) and international public private initiatives (such as the UNGC). In addition, more than 120 rating and ranking organizations are sending questionnaires, supporting more than 520 different rating and ranking products, to most publicly listed companies worldwide. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the public disclosure of non-financial information is limited to an elite of several thousand companies in the world. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” speaks a clear language. Reporting on non-financial issues has yet to attain the critical mass required to unleash an improvement in the quality of environmental and societal protection requisite to yielding the design of a green and inclusive economy. What has happened so far won’t fulfill what’s needed: a holistic and data capturing, multi-capital accounting, and systemic reporting of how values are generated and what impact they have on the macro-level challenges.

The Reporting 3.0 Platform offers a unique and pre-competitive neutral space for discussion, a lab style collaboration for solutions development, and hands-on support to the relevant constituencies. The platform naturally fosters the type of collaboration that makes a new operating system for future-fit disclosure practices possible. The Reporting 3.0 Platform was launched in 2012 with the aim to create a multi-stakeholder oriented global community to coordinating, structuring and furthering the development of knowledge and solutions in the field of non-financial reporting.

The Reporting 3.0 Platform adds value to the reporting community in the following domains: from the provision of the most up-to-date knowledge on reporting, accounting, data and new business models, to the further support of the standard setting community, the creation of blueprints for companies, cities and regions and the building up of impactful new collaborations. In order to deliver a high quality value to its community, the work of the Reporting 3.0 Platform drives the necessary integration between social and environmental sustainability, financial performance and sustainable growth.

Ralph is one of the co-initiators of the Reporting 3.0 Platform and acts as the lead content curator and facilitator in Reporting 3.0 events. He is a member of the Steering Board of Reporting 3.0.