Corporate Sustainability Bridging the Gap Between Sustainability Reporting and Business Operations

This research project has set out to determine how best a corporation can bridge the gap between sustainability reporting and operations and establish the overarching characteristics a corporation can implement in order to promote sustainability within their operations. In order to achieve this goal, I looked at two categorically different corporations: companies that have been proactive to sustainability and companies who have been reactive, those being corporations who have developed sustainability strategies in response to market pressures. Through a sustainabilitycomparative analysis, determining which category achieves sustainability goals more often and more successfully and a deeper analysis through interviews and further research to determine how corporations within each category promote sustainability initiatives within their organiza- tion differently, I was able to establish overarching sustainability characteristics. I determined corporations deemed proactive outperformed those deemed reactive when it comes to successful- ly achieving sustainability goals and that sustainability strategies are promoted differently name- ly through the integration of the sustainability departments into the corporate structure and im- plementation of sustainability initiatives into employee mandates. Ultimately I established a set of overarching characteristics that can be employed in order to promote sustainability and bridge the gap between sustainability reporting and operations: those being CEO buy-in, quantifiability, disclosure and integrative reporting.