Introducing: The Guide to Corporate Social Responsibility 2013

Welcome to Blue & Green Tomorrow’s Guide to Corporate Social Responsibility 2013. In these pages, we outline why CSR, responsible business, sustainability – whatever you wish to call it – cannot simply be an obligatory side-project that comes to the fore every 12 months in the form of a glossy report.

This isn’t corporate social responsibility; this is public relations and greenwash.

CSR reporting often gets ridiculed as an inadequate response to unsustainable business – an issue that was debated at a recent event in London (which is reviewed on page 6 of this guide).

Michael Solomon, whose Responsible 100 project led the event, goes into detail on the subject on pages 8-11, describing how business must go from the bad outweighing the good, to the good outweighing the bad.

It’s interesting reading the eight different responses to the five CSR questions on pages 14-15 (which go into more detail on pages 16-29). While opinions diverge on whether CSR has indeed reached its sell-by date, one thing all parties could agree on was the need for good business.

As a magazine devoted to sustainable investment, I’ll therefore leave you with the wise words of American writer Henry David Thoreau.

“Goodness”, he once said, “is the only investment that never fails.”

Click here to download The Guide to Corporate Social Responsibility 2013 (10MB file).

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You can also access the report on Issuu and Scribd.

Our six previous reports in 2013 have covered sustainable tourism, sustainable investment, ownership, ethical financial advisers, fair trade and ethical funds. We published seven reports last year in our Guide to… series, covering ethical shopping, sustainable banking, sustainable investment, sustainable tourism, limitless clean energy and responsible media, as well as a second sustainable investment issue that was published as part of National Ethical Investment Week.