A Sustainability Results Statement (SRS) is a short (one or two side) document issued by a company at the same time as its financial results.  It contains those elements of a company’s sustainability performance that are most relevant to investors.

The ‘SRS’ is modelled on a company’s results news release or quarterly sales update.  It is unaudited and unformatted; it contains no pictures and no case studies.

Content

An SRS should be focussed on three or four of the company’s most significant sustainability performance areas; it should be timely and it should be directed purely towards an investor audience.

Format

Indeed, much of the information within it may be drawn from a company’s full financial results statement – or could be information that was discarded, on grounds of brevity, in the later stages of putting together the full results statement.

Distribution

The ‘SRS’ should be distributed via all capital markets distribution channels and via SRI-CONNECT’s Market Buzz to reach the SRI investor audience.

The key elements of the SRS should feature in the company’s results presentation to analysts and in any supporting webcast – if this is produced.

A thought

The issues covered by the SRS are likely to be the same that are picked up by ‘integrated reporting’.  Accordingly, the process of producing an SRS might prove useful preparation for companies that plan to move towards integrated reporting.