Business Blog

From the Report Alert:

American Electric Power has published its second corporate sustainability report – “Working Together For A Brighter Future.” available from www.aep.com/cr. This year’s report highlights the progress the company has made since implementing its CSR strategy and addresses issues that affect AEP’s ongoing sustainability including climate change; environmental performance; public policy; energy security, reliability and growth; work force issues; stakeholder engagement and leadership, management and strategy. As part of the company’s focus on sustainability, AEP management met with more than 100 stakeholders during the last year to receive input about the company’s performance, reporting process and its business practices. Stakeholders participating included state and federal regulators, power plant neighbors, environmental and conservation advocates, customers, employees, investors, community leaders and representatives from academia. The report was prepared according to G3 Reporting Principles established by the Global Reporting Initiative, a voluntary reporting framework used by organizations around the world as the basis for sustainability reporting.

This report might be useful for cluster students working on the “greening of business”project.  You can get the report directly from AEP’s website.  To find other similar reports, go to the Corporate Register to search and browse reports.  You can find other resources on corporate responsibility, citizenship, and green business on the Biz Wiki.

Share This

From the Pew Center on Global Climate Change:

Adapting to Climate Change: A Business Approach

Prepared for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change
April 2008

By:
Frances G. Sussman and J. Randall Freed
ICF International

This report outlines a sensible business approach to analyzing and adapting to the physical risks of climate change. It focuses on a critical first step in assessing these climate impacts: understanding the potential risks to business and the importance of taking action to mitigate those risks. Not all businesses need to take action now; this paper develops a qualitative screening process to assess whether a business is likely to be vulnerable to the physical risks associated with climate change, and whether a more detailed risk assessment is warranted.

The report can be downloaded here. (PDF)

There is also a related report called “Corporate Strategies That Address Climate Change” that can be downloaded from Pew as well.

Share This

This week’s time magazine is focusing on the environment:

So far the U.S. has largely sat out the war against climate change—but that can change. We have a plan for making America the global leader on global warming

The article is a good read, and might give business researchers a good amount of information about environmental issues.  Of particular interest to the business researcher is the Top Green Companies and the Top Green Websites.

Share This

The clusters are working on the topic of “the greening of business.”  To assist with the topic, I have added a number of links to the Corporate Responsibility, Citizenship, and Green Business Guide in the Biz Wiki.  The list is not exhaustive, but should be sufficient if your just beginning your research.   If you have a source that might be worth adding, please contact me.

Share This

As the clusters are working on the social networking industry, I’ve put together a list of some good places to look.

Mintel Reports. Contains a market research report titled “Social Networking and Connectivity in the Digital Age – US – January 2008″.

TableBase. Contains tables and statistics. Try searching for Facebook of MySpace as keywords.

Pew Internet & American Life Project. Has a number of useful reports on how people use the web.

Faulkner’s Advisory for IT Studies. Contains articles on a variety of technology topics.

Gartner. Contains news and research reports on the information technology industry.

Google Blog Search. Good for searching blogs on topics. It’s also useful to sort search results by date.

Share This