The search for the most active Italian companies on the sustainability front resumes. After a very participatory first edition and after Cop26 which re-proposed the theme of climate change in all its gravity, the Sustainability Leader competition, created by Sole 24 Ore and Statista to reward the efforts of the companies most committed to the green turnaround, starts again. . The 2022 call is already available online, complete with line k to submit your application by 31 December 2021.
The requirements to apply
To participate, companies must comply with the integrity criteria (pursuant to Legislative Decree 50/2016), share the sustainability and statutory reports 2020 or provide the data indicated in the questionnaire. Each candidate must have its registered office in Italy; if it is part of a foreign group it must have reported sustainability in Italy and not only at group level. This represents a novelty compared to the first edition, during which companies belonging to groups with foreign capital were excluded in principle, but then it was not easy to accurately verify the shareholding structure of each candidate company. Defense and gaming companies continue to be excluded, as do various international sustainability indices.
In addition to self-nominations, Statista conducts an autonomous survey on a sample of 1,500 large and medium-sized Italian companies drawn from public databases, which publish sustainability reports and disclose the main financial statement data online. This is an unsolicited and objective analysis, not subject to the payment of fees by companies.
How the ranking is born
“Each company (both the self-nominated ones and those analyzed by us) must disclose about thirty Key performance indicators (KPIs) that we believe reveal interesting performances in terms of sustainability and social and environmental responsibility – explains Marco Paciocco, Senior analyst at Statista ad Hamburg, Germany -. We investigate various areas, such as energy consumption, the use of energy from renewable sources, emissions, waste management, water consumption, accidents at work, welfare policies and social responsibility actions, the rate turnover, diversity, employee wages, but also transparency (symbolized by the online publication of reports) and economic sustainability (profit, Ebitda, debts, investments in research). The data must be confirmed by the administrator or a member of the company’s executive committee, under penalty of exclusion from the candidature. We assign a score on a 100 basis to the various indicators and we discard those who scored low in one of the three dimensions of sustainability: social, environmental and economic. Only the best ones enter the list, after an accurate analysis and various checks, including reputational ones “.
A transparent and prestigious initiative
Participation in the initiative is free and transparent: entry into the list and citation in articles are not subject to economic transactions, like the other lists or rankings that Il Sole 24 Ore and Statista have already successfully created for some years: Leader growth (on companies with the highest growth rate in the last three years) and law firms of the year. To use the logo in advertising or communication materials or on the company website, there is a fee instead.