SRI and ESG Issues for Corporations: What the Press Talks About

Presuming, a) that public opinion obliges corporations to respond and, b) that newspapers reflect and shape that opinion, the Trends in Sustainability website's online analysis tool tells us what is important these days. It does that by counting buzzwords and phrases in such newspapers as the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Vancouver Sun, the Toronto Star and the Toronto Sun (but not any elsewhere in the country) day by day going back to 1990. It also contains the results for 110 other newspapers around the world. Take a look at the graph below I pulled up from the tool.

Human rights and Climate change are the hot topics, much dominating such issues as child labour, air pollution, poverty and biodiversity. Another take on this is through their other metric, which they call concepts, in which Sustainability is the tops in newsprint in Canada and around the world (including the USA), ahead of business ethics, governance and citizenship. It is also interesting to note that Canada leads the world average in such concern, or at least in writing about it! (though I must also note that Australia is even more interested in Climate Change and Sustainability than Canada) In any case, this more or less sets the corporate agenda in what to address, whether it is with mere words or with action.