Be innovative with CSR efforts

NEXT year will be a good start for corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Malaysia. According to the International Trade and Industry Ministry secretary-general Datuk Isham Ishak recently, Bursa Malaysia has made it compulsory for listed companies to report on whatever CSR programmes they initiate – starting from 2019. In 2017, the local bourse had introduced the New Sustainability Framework targeted towards private limited companies (PLCs), and now it’s taking it towards another level.

However, it must be made clear that CSR does not just encompass community projects, as it is much more than that. One of the central themes of CSR concerns the environment. As one may be aware, after the riches of the oil industry were discovered, environment degradation became synonymous with it. Dramatic events like the Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska in 1989 or British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 faux pas come to mind. And closer to home, about six tonnes of diesel and hundreds of litres of engine oil floated from the Penang sea towards Perak when a ship sank, threatening fish and shrimp farms and the coastal environment along several kilometres of northern Perak’s coast in July.