The Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) fulfilled its commitment to provide guidance to its market on sustainability reporting, launching its guidance “Communicating Sustainability” on 15 March 2018. The CSE now joins 37 other exchanges worldwide that are providing guidance on reporting environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues for listed companies in their markets.

“CSE wishes to publicly demonstrate its commitment to sustainability, while promoting better business practices within the Sri Lankan capital market,” said CEO Rajeeva Bandaranaike. “Moreover, CSE encourages listed companies to measure and publicly report their ESG performance and impacts.”

The CSE committed in 2017 to developing a guidance, as part of the United Nations’ campaign to encourage all stock exchanges to provide guidance on ESG reporting. The campaign, run by the UN Sustainable Stock Exchanges (SSE) initiative, was launched in 2015 when only 14 stock exchanges provided guidance to their markets on ESG reporting. There are now 38 stock exchanges with such guidance, and a further 10 stock exchanges committed to producing a guidance for their markets in the near future.

The SSE developed a template, or “Model Guidance”, to assist stock exchanges in developing a guidance on ESG reporting for their listed companies, which can now be used along with a growing number of samples from the public guidance documents of other exchanges. In addition, the World Federation of Exchanges developed a set of metrics aimed to accompany the SSE’s Model Guidance. For all guidance documents, visit the SSE’s webpage on ESG guidance: https://sseinitiative.org/esg-guidance/