Many firms are not keen on managing sustainability. Why?

As we put the finishing touches to our latest Volans report, Harvard Business Review published a cover story titled "Leadership in the age of transparency". An accompanying caption was designed to worry many on corporate boards and in C-suites: "Consumers know everything about your company," it ran, "not just its carbon emissions but its countless other invisible effects on the globe. That has changed the rules of business forever."

Our report, The Transparent Economy, was launched in late May at the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) summit in Amsterdam. It investigates where the transparency, accountability and sustainability agendas are likely to take us over the next decade.

Sustainability is on the business agenda as never before. Yet the uncomfortable, inconvenient truth is that most companies are not taking a keen approach to managing sustainability: only around 30 per cent of executives told consultants McKinsey that their companies sought opportunities to invest in sustainability or embed it in their business practices.

Properly understood, sustainability is not the same as corporate social responsibility-nor can it be reduced to achieving a balance across economic, social and environmental bottom lines. It is about the fundamental, intergenerational task of winding down the dysfunctional economic models of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the evolution of new ones fit for a human population headed towards nine billion people by 2050.

This is the context for our GRI report, backed by Dow Chemical, Novo Nordisk and SAP. But if sustainability reporting is the answer, what was the question?

The original intent wasn't to provide work for consultants and designers. It wasn't to boost the number of entries to sustainability reporting award schemes. And it wasn't to simply justify CSR and sustainability departments. Instead, it was aimed at opening up business thinking to the wider society, to spur the introduction of the necessary management systems, to create information-rich links across global supply chains and, ultimately, to better inform a push towards more sustainable development.

John Elkington is executive chairman of Volans (www.volans.com) and non-executive director at SustainAbility (www.sustainability.com)