CorporateResponsibility@BerkeleyLaw | Roundtable on Sustainability Disclosure | January 31st | San Francisco
SUMMARY OF PROGRAM
Berkeley Law is in the process of developing a research agenda for Corporate Responsibility@BerkeleyLaw, a new initiative on sustainability and corporate responsibility which is part of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business (BCLB). Our long term goal is to identify common principles regarding corporate responsibility, the manner in which companies should disclose sustainability metrics to facilitate transparency, comparability and accountability, and the potential for using these disclosures to evaluate the relationship between sustainability and economic performance.
Our starting point is some of the questions that were posed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) in its April 2016 Concept Release about the role of sustainability disclosure in financial reporting. That release received more than 26,000 comments in response. Although it is unlikely that the SEC will move forward, at least in the short term, to require increased sustainability disclosure, the high level of response demonstrates that sustainability and sustainability disclosure are important topics for investors, issuers and others. BCLB’s research project will be led by Professor Jill Fisch who comes to Berkeley from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and whose work focuses on securities regulation and corporate governance.
KEY DETAILS
Date and Time: January 31st | 11:30am to 2pm
Location: Morrison & Foerster, 425 Market Street, 33rd Floor, San Francisco
- Participants will check in at the lobby level. Please bring photo ID.
Participants: Here is a list of current participants
Lunch will be served
Please email, call or text Amelia Miazad (amiazad@law.berekeley.edu | 415.265.0569) with any questions.
OVERVIEW OF ISSUES
Here is a link to Berkeley Law’s overall mission statement for this research. This roundtable will focus on the questions below:
How should companies disclose their sustainability practices?
- What are the existing approaches and standard setters? (such as CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), Global Reporting Initiative, the International Integrated Reporting Council, SASB, and the United Nations Global Compact). What information are issuers disclosing voluntarily and why? Is existing voluntary disclosure inconsistent and incomplete?
- Should increased sustainability disclosure be part of financial reporting and part of the SEC’s regulatory requirements?
- To what extent are sustainability issues material to investors within the framework of the Supreme Court’s definition of materiality? Are there specific sustainability or public policy issues that are important to informed voting and investment decisions? To what extent is sustainability a component of business risk and risk disclosure. Other than business risk, are there other reasons that sustainability disclosures are important to investors? Has the importance of sustainability disclosures changed since the SEC began considering these issues in 1975?
- How are sustainability disclosures important to groups other than investors?
- What are the arguments in favor of mandating increased sustainability disclosure?
- What are the costs of existing sustainability disclosure? What would be the costs of increased disclosures?
- Should sustainability disclosure be integrated with capital markets disclosure or handled separately? What are the potential problems with integration – complexity, increased liability risk? What are the potential benefits – transparency, comparability? Is sustainability consistent with line-item disclosure approach of federal regulation? Would integration increase quality and integrity of disclosure?
- How are existing sustainability disclosures verified or audited? Are there weaknesses in the existing approach?