THREE Singapore companies made it to this year's list of the world's 100 most sustainable big corporations, up from two last year.
Property developers City Developments (CDL) and CapitaLand came in 36th and 63rd respectively, slipping from 25th and 33rd last year. Telco Singtel rejoined the list at 95th place, after dropping out last year. It took 63rd place in 2018.
The Global 100 list ranks large corporations across the globe on metrics such as reducing carbon and waste, "clean revenue", CEO-to-average-worker-pay ratio and board gender diversity.
In its 16th year, the ranking is compiled by Corporate Knights, a Toronto-based sustainable-business magazine and research company.
Its "clean revenue" metric, which counts for half of each company's score, measures the percentage of revenue earned from products or services that have environmental, or well-defined social benefits.
This year's top 100 companies were selected from a pool of 7,395 publicly listed companies with more than US$1 billion in revenue, and assessed relative to their industry peers using publicly available information.
CDL was first and CapitaLand second among the 229 real estate firms in the study; Singtel was fourth among the 126 companies in its industry group.
CDL group CEO Sherman Kwek said: "Climate change affects all of us and concerted action is needed to mitigate its impact. Beyond delivering financial performance, businesses have a responsibility to their investors, stakeholders and the community to drive environmental stewardship."
CapitaLand's chief sustainability officer Lynette Leong said: "As one of Asia's largest diversified real estate groups, CapitaLand can effect a greater positive influence through our enlarged portfolio and operations."
The group links executive compensation to sustainability targets and reaps "clean revenue" from its green real estate portfolio.
Only 18 companies in this year's Global 100 hail from Asia; 49 are from Europe, while the US and Canada accounted for 29. Latin America boasts just three members on the list, all from Brazil, and South Africa's Standard Bank was the only representative of the African continent.
The full rankings were unveiled on the sidelines of this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which began on Tuesday.
The overall top-ranked company this year is Danish renewable energy provider Orsted. The firm, which a decade ago produced 85 per cent of its energy from fossil fuels and 15 per cent from renewable energy, has reversed that proportion and targets to "essentially become carbon neutral" by 2025.
Copyright © 2020 Singapore Press Holdings
This article was from The Singapore Business Times and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.
