Sustainability Accounting Standards Board: SASB connects businesses and investors on the financial impacts of sustainability. SASB Standards enable businesses around the world to identify, manage, and communicate financially material sustainability information to investors. They are industry-specific and are designed to be decision-useful for investors and cost-effective for companies. They are developed using a process that is evidence based and market informed.
United Nations Global Compact: In 2021, Neo became a signatory to the UN Global Compact. By incorporating the 10 Principles of the UN Global Compact into strategies, policies and procedures, and establishing a culture of integrity, Neo is not only upholding its basic responsibilities to our planet and people, but also setting the stage for long-term success.
The 10 Principles of the UN Global Compact are derived from: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Labour Organization’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the United Nations Convention Against Corruption.
United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals: The SDGs are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.” The SDGs were established in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly (UN-GA) and are intended to be achieved by the year 2030. They are included in the UN-GA Resolution called the 2030 Agenda.
Neo’s inaugural Sustainability Report production process began with a clear mandate by our Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer to form an internal working group that would deliver an ESG report on 2021. This internal working group became Neo’s Working Group on Sustainability and began developing the report’s production strategy. The first step was to benchmark Neo against 20 other corporate issuers in terms of disclosure granularity and standards deployed.
Next, Neo’s Working Group on Sustainability recruited expert advice from external advisors to buttress our in-house knowledge base. This included educational material and training courses on ESG Reporting Standards and Frameworks. With the assistance of our external advisor, we then created a shortlist of relevant topics to be assessed for inclusion in our 2021 Sustainability Report. Relevant topics were those that may reasonably be considered important for reflecting the organization’s economic, environmental, and social impacts, or influencing the decisions of stakeholders. All such topics potentially merit inclusion in Neo’s future sustainability reporting. Neo applied a wide-ranging radar to identify all relevant topics, based on standard disclosure guidance set by SASB, and UN SDG frameworks. This was informed by the use of a survey and a series of confidential one-on-one interviews of the Board HESS Committee’s Director members and Neo’s senior management team.