Geneva, Switzerland 29 January 2020: Today, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) launched a report on Modernizing governance: challenges and recommendations for corporate directors. The report aims to strengthen board decision-making and oversight to respond to today’s challenges.
Boards play a fundamental role in ensuring business resilience and long-term value creation. Yet many boards remain ill-equipped to oversee and assure for the company’s capacity to appreciate, and act on, the current changing and volatile landscape. This report offers insights and suggestions to advance the board agenda to respond to the increasing demands and expectations of stakeholders.
“All the top risks were environmental and social in the 2020 World Economic Forum’s Risk Report and we’ve seen that many boards struggle to modernize their governance to stay ahead. This work helps boards understand the current gaps and helps strengthen their knowledge, decision-making and processes” comments Rodney Irwin, Managing Director and Senior Management Team at WBCSD.
Philippe Joubert, Founder and CEO of Earth on Board, Senior Advisor and Special Envoy Energy and Climate for WBCSD says “This report represents the first phase of a journey to propose a set of instruments that will help boards manage their fundamental tasks and to fulfill their duties. Built on interviews with board members, it highlights practical changes needed in all areas of board responsibility and showcases useful best practices. The initial recommendations give food for thought that all boards can tailor to their own specific context.”
This report builds on the earlier WBCSD report ‘The state of corporate governance in the era of sustainability’, which reviews the international corporate governance landscape from a regulatory, business and academic perspective across 12 jurisdictions.
