The Azores Sustainability and CSR Services
Green opportunities that matter
Alina Liciu is founder and managing partner of the agency. She is a Sustainability and Product Management professional with 6 years background in Retail and FMCG in top multinational companies Leroy Merlin and Procter&Gamble. She has a certificate from Global Reporting Initiative for G4 Reporting Guidelines, the most widely used standard for sustainability reporting.
Her passion is strategic sustainability and social responsibility as a means to connect market benefits to environmental protection and social change. She focuses on ROI (Return on Investment) in all her projects. She is results oriented and commercially minded while aiming for sustainable business solutions. Her strength is mixing creativity and rigorous research as a way to create value in developing her projects.
If you want to get in touch, she may be contacted via email at office@sustainabilityindex.ro
A few thougths on sustainability context
Companies are increasingly investing in social and environmental initiatives.
Pressures are growing given the current sustainability context. From an environmental side, the level of CO2 emissions is higher than ever, the need for energetic efficiency is growing and the amount of waste we generate should be reduced or reused in much smarter ways.
From a social point of view, efforts of the most important international institutions, including The European Commission, are focused to fight poverty and social exclusion. As social injustice is becoming more visible, companies that do not take a strong commitment to social welfare are at risk. Big brands can be damaged: See the accident in Bangladesh where many international garment brands were producing their clothes. With social media gaining more strength every day, individuals everywhere are becoming better connected and more vocal, spotting unethical behavior and highlighting it.
From an economical point of view, customers everywhere are more price conscious and better informed and they look for brands they can trust. As companies are strengthening their efforts to gain and secure consumer loyalty they are increasingly finding out that engaging in sustainability and social responsibility is a key aspect to consider.
There is a growing tendency that companies disclose information on their sustainability engagement.
Large companies are leading the way and 95% of top 250 companies are already publishing a sustainability report every year. Meanwhile SMEs follow that leadership and are catching up, according to United Nations Global Corporate Sustainability Report 2013.
There are 7 countries that have introduced laws requesting big companies to be transparent and publish their CSR report (Norway, Denmark, France, The Netherlands, Australia and India).
In April 2014 the European Parliament adopted the Directive on the disclosure of non-financial and diversity information. „By disclosing social, environmental and governance information, enterprises often find that they can better identify and manage issues that influence their business success.” (Source: ec.europa.eu)
The most widely used standard to report on sustainability and CSR is Global Reporting Initiative. Alina Liciu is one of the first Romanian consultants who has a certificate from GRI in order to use G4 reporting guidelines.
This is a powerful tool to empower the companies in Romania to increase their investment in sustainable development.