Sustainability reporting
Sustainability information as a strategic tool to trigger action on children’s rights.
Corporate sustainability reporting is one of the key pillars of an effective sustainable corporate legal framework, complimentary to human rights and environmental due diligence legislation. Sustainability reporting enhance corporate transparency, allowing key stakeholders to evaluate and measure companies’ performance on human rights and allows the company to demonstrate effective implementation of human rights and environmental due diligence.
Children’s rights are both stand-alone sustainability topics (such as child labour) and are a specific dimension of more general sustainability topics (e.g. work-life balance; consumer protection). Child rights related sustainability issues are relevant for all sustainability reporting frameworks to various degrees, whether they adopt financial materiality or impact materiality only or double materiality.
However, children’s rights rarely appear in companies’ sustainability reporting beyond philanthropic initiatives. Even when negative impacts on child rights are reported, these usually cover few issues and effective business actions to address them are often not reported.
Transparency on companies’ impacts and actions to address adverse impacts on children enables States, investors, civil society and consumers to assess companies' performance on children’s rights, thus driving business’ respect for children’s rights.
UNICEF advocates for the effective integration of relevant children’s rights reporting requirements in sustainability reporting and the adequate reporting of children’s rights by companies in sustainability reports.
UNICEF works in partnership with Governments, standards setters, civil society and the private sector to provide technical assistance and support in designing these frameworks in a way that they adequately allow for companies to report on children’s rights as they relate to sustainability issues and provides guidance on how to effectively report on children’s rights under sustainability reporting frameworks.
