The CSR MarketPlace Exhibition of this year where 39 companies and 32 civil organizations will present their achievements in CSR will be opened by KÖVET Association on 18 April 2013.

CSR MarketPlaces were the most successful events of the KÖVET in 2009 as well as in 2011. They were not only for expounding the good CSR practices and for promoting of the idea of sustainability, but they served also as a platform for building and deepening the relationships between the exhibitory companies and non-governmental organizations.

The novelty of this year is the European CSR Award, founded by the European Committee;   prize winners will be announced during the CSR MarketPlace. The application for the Award required innovative and effective projects, realized through the cooperation between companies and non-profit organizations as shared values.

The caseworks will be collected and published in the exhibition catalogue of the 2013 CSR MarketPlace in printed form and will be available  also on-line  on the web-site www.csrpiac.hu

Just as before, the national winners of each category will be judged in the following categories:  Most Oustanding Solution of 2013 Award, Truly Responsible Enterprise Award, Small Business Enterprise Special Award, Special Award for Environmentally Aware Company Management.

Visitors of the CSR MarketPlace may participate in the open judging of candidates for the European CSR Award shortlist and in the live round-table conference held on the theme of Business-NGO cooperation.

The event will be escorted by desirable satellite programs as NGO-company rapid date, bio-food tasting or massage.

You can register for the event here.

Registration will be closed on April 12.

Detailed program of the workshops can be found here.

For more information please contact:

Judit Hézer, event manager

Tel: +36/1/473-2290

E-mail: hezer@kovet.hu www.kovet.hu

BCSDH is the CSR MarketPlace cooperation partner.

Sustainability as a Corporate Startegy – not just an Option but a Business Goal

The Business Council for Sustainable Development Hungary (BCSDH) and the British Embassy Budapest kindly invite you to the next series of BCSDH’s ‘Business Breakfasts about Sustainable Development’.

The event will be opened by His Excellency Jonathan Knott, British Ambassador to Hungary

Our guest speaker is Mr. András Gyenes, Executive Director, Unilever Hungary

Unilever is a British-Dutch owned company having achieved Food & Beverage super-sector leadership of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (DJSI) annually in the past 14 years. This year the company was rated among the 100 most sustainable companies of the world at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The Hungarian subsidiary started its operations in 1991. The total amount of the investments of the company was HUF 6.2 billion during the past 20 years in Hungary. The approach of sustainable living is not new-fangled at Unilever nevertheless in 2010 the company launched its long-term Sustainable Living Plan based on a new way of thinking and three pivots. In the plan they undertake to double their business turnover while reducing their environmental impact by half by 2020.

In the past 20 years Andras Gyenes had many different decision-making positions within Unilever, besides Hungary he worked in Czech Republic, Croatia and the Netherlands. The new managing director has management, financial, sales and marketing experience. As VP of the region he will be responsible for the business planning, financial results and the performance indicators of four countries (Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina). Andras Gyenes joined Unilever in 1993 straight from the university and he started as a financial trainee, later he worked in the Netherlands as a senior auditor. Andras had different leadership positions since 1998, in the past 10 years he worked as managing director and marketing director. Andras Gyenes graduated in 1993 in the Janus Pannonius University of Pécs as an economist, he speaks fluent English. He spends his free time with his family and his eight years old daughter, he likes the operas and playing tennis.

Date: Tuesday, 19 March 2013, 10:00-11:00 (registration, arrival from 9:30)

Venue: Hotel Nemzeti Budapest, (1088 Budapest, József krt. 4.)

Official language of the event is Hungarian and English. If you need translation, please let us know up to 5 March.

Parking: Parking spacesare provided in the garage of BOE Palace (Csokonay Street, 150 meters far from the Hotel). Fee: 440 HUF / hour.

Registration

Participation is free of charge for BCSDH member companies (1 person per member).

For non-members:  10 000 HUF/ person (VAT free).

To guarantee your seat, register by 15 March via e-mail at Kata Bocskai, kata.bocskai@bcsdh.hu, please mark name and position of the participant and the company’s billing address.

If oversubscribed, members of BCSDH and the British Investors Forum will be given preference.

Written cancellations are accepted by 15 March, 12:00. Late cancellations or “no-shows” will be charged.

The Global 100 list of the world’s most sustainable corporations was announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The Global 100 consists of the 100 top‐performing stocks worldwide on a range of sectorspecific ‘sustainability’ metrics. In aggregate, the Global 100 had revenues of US$3 trillion (roughly 4.5 per cent of global GDP) and a workforce of nearly 5.3 million in 2011.  Siemens, Telenor, Shell and Unilever, which daughter companies are members of BCSD Hungary are ranked among the Global 100.
The top‐ranked company in this year’s Global 100 was Umicore (EBR: UMI), the Belgium‐based materials technology and recycling company. The top 5 were rounded out by Natura Cosmeticos, Statoil, Neste Oil and Novo Nordisk. Umicore derives the majority of its revenue (2011: US$20 billion) from clean technologies such as catalysts that reduce pollution from vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. It achieved the top overall ranking in the 2013 Global 100 due to its strong, across‐the‐board sustainability performance. The company notched top‐quartile performance on six of the 12 indicators used in the project, including carbon and water productivity, and employee turnover. Commenting on this year’s Global 100, Toby Heaps, Corporate Knights CEO, remarked, “the Global 100 are leading a resource productivity revolution, transforming waste into treasure and doing more with less. They are steering our civilization away from ecological overshoot and back to a place of balance with our planet.” He added, “on carbon, water, energy, and waste, the Global 100 are on track to double their resource productivity by 2025 in two‐thirds of the cases, and in an era of peak commodity prices, this makes as many dollars as it does sense.” Canada and the United States led the way in country representation, each with 10 constituents, followed by Australia, Britain and France, each with 9 constituents. Overall, the Global 100 drew companies from 22 countries on six continents. Corporate Knights uses its flagship Global 100 ranking and the underlying research methodology to explore ‘sustainable’ investment strategies with investors. Doug Morrow, the VP Research at Corporate Knights, says, “the Global 100 is one of the few equity indexes that we are aware of that has outperformed the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) –the Global 100’s benchmark—by over 900 bps over the last 8 years. It turns out that our methodology for stock selection in the Global 100 is a strong proxy for corporate operational efficiency, which has been an increasingly important driver of stock returns in recent years.” Corporate Knights collected data for the project primarily from Bloomberg and through direct engagement with the 350 companies that made the project’s shortlist, selected from the project’s starting universe of all global mid and large cap stocks (numbering approximately 4,000). The Global 100 uses a two‐step methodology. First, companies from the starting universe are screened according to their sustainability disclosure practices, financial health, product types and recent legal payouts. Those companies that remain are then scored, relative to their samesector peers, on a set of key performance indicators (KPIs). A different suite of KPIs is used for companies in each industry, depending on recent reporting trends in each industry group. Added Morrow, “we feel that the sustainability data that flows into our Global 100 research model, once properly cleansed, can contain hidden and statistically robust signals about companies’ future financial performance. It is a vastly underutilized source of competitive information on Wall Street and in the asset management community worldwide.”

For full rankings and other details, please see: www.global100.org

In 2013 WBCSD will revise Vision 2050, update it, and prioritize the Must Haves based on scientific findings and social research. Vision 2050 will be translated into actionable and investable items for the medium term.

The Vision 2050 project addressed three questions: What does a sustainable world look like? How can we realize it? What are the roles business can play in ensuring more rapid progress toward that world?

Just 40 years from now, some 30% more people will be living on this planet. For business, the good news is that this growth will deliver billions of new consumers who want homes and cars and television sets. The bad news is that shrinking resources and potentially changing climates will limit the ability of all 9 billion of us to attain or maintain the consumptive lifestyle that is commensurate with wealth in today’s affluent markets. In the WBCSD’s Vision 2050 project, 29 global companies representing 14 industries tackled this dilemma. They developed a vision, based on dialogues in 20 countries with several hundred companies as well as experts, of a world on-track toward sustainability by 2050. This will be a world in which the global population is not just living on the planet, but living well and within the limits of the planet

For more information about Vision 2050 and download the full report, please visit www.wbcsd.org

If you are interested in Hungary’s Vision 2050, please click here.