OREANDA-NEWS. December 25, 2012. The percentage of companies listed on BM&FBOVESPA and adhering to Report or Explain rose from 45.31% in May to 57.95% in October 2012. In all, 253 companies have already published information in their Reference Form about social, environmental and corporate governance dimensions, or they have explained why they do not yet do so. This is according to an extra update of the data executed by BM&FBOVESPA. In May the number was 203.

Report or Explain is a recommendation that BM&FBOVESPA launched this year at Rio +20 with the objective of easing the access of all stakeholders’ - especially investors and analysts – to information regarding companies’ business and sustainability practices, providing transparency to the market. The Exchange’s initiative encourages companies to register in their reference forms that they will publish sustainability reports.

As a result, the public has access to an easily visualized table that presents links to the reports of the companies that publish this information, the explanations given by the companies that have not done so yet, as well as links to those that have left the answer blank. The companies that provided the information in their Reference Form (item 7.8) by October 19 have now joined the updated data bank.

Socio-environmental information is an extremely useful instrument that has been gaining ever more importance for investors. According to a recent survey developed by the Sustainability Study Center of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (GVces) and carried out with pension funds, sustainability reports are among the main sources of information used by analysts.