US Sustainability Accounting Standards Board created

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05 Jul 2012

A new 'Sustainability Accounting Standards Board' (SASB) has been launched in the United States. The SASB's main goal is to establish and maintain industry-specific sustainability accounting standards appropriate for use in standard filing instruments, such as the Form 10-K and 20-F.

SASB has developed the Sustainable Industry Classification System (SICS), which categorises industries in order to acknowledge their resource intensity as well as their sustainability innovation potential.

For those issues deemed material, SASB intends to create industry-specific sustainability accounting standards that enable a company to characterise their performance with respect to the issue. A standard will be developed for each of the 102 industries in the SICS.

SASB projects that its sustainability standards will be completed within 2.5 years of the launch of the first Industry Working Groups in Q4 2012. SASB intends to convene Industry Working Groups at the rate of one sector per quarter.

SASB seeks to be complementary to global initiatives including the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), the Global Initiative for Sustainability Ratings (GISR), the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and others.

Further information is available on the SASB's recently launched website: www.sasb.org.

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