People ... Joan Rogers
Sustainability / Accountability

Investors Want More Firms to Be More Open. This Nonprofit Is Trying to Make It Happen.

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Investors Want More Firms to Be More Open. This Nonprofit Is Trying to Make It Happen.

Jean Rogers, shown in the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board’s office, said investors want wider corporate disclosures about impacts of their operations, such as greenhouse gas emissions. Credit Brian Flaherty for The New York Times

Jean Rogers cut her teeth as an environmental engineer. Early in her career, she worked to clean up Superfund sites, donning hazmat suits to take samples of soil and groundwater polluted by industrial activity.

That firsthand look at how industry could despoil nature left her distrustful of big business.

“I became very disillusioned with what was happening, with how businesses were dealing with these issues,” she said. “I was literally cleaning up their messes.”

But today, as chief executive of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, Ms. Rogers is working closely with some of the biggest corporations on the planet, prodding them to be more forthcoming about the environmental and social impacts of their operations.

The board, an independent nonprofit organization that she founded in 2011, has one mission: To develop standards that get public American companies to disclose more information about sustainability concerns, such as greenhouse gas emissions and work force diversity, in their filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Ms. Rogers, 50, runs the standards board from an office in San Francisco’s financial district. She has parlayed her experience as an environmental engineer into an influential role on Wall Street, where she is helping shape what companies reveal to the public.

“Jean Rogers and the SASB leadership know what they’re doing,” said Alice Korngold, who runs a consulting firm that works on corporate sustainability. “Her technical skills in this area are unmatched.”

The goal is not purely idealistic. Within the investor community, these issues are increasingly viewed as material, capable of swaying a company’s stock price.

Already, these issues are making headlines. Last month, Exxon Mobil conceded it might need to write down the value of some of its oil and gas assets.

Coal companies have been criticized for failing to warn investors that their businesses were in jeopardy because of environmental problems they had helped create. And Chipotle has drawn fire for lax reporting about food safety concerns.

And still, companies often use opaque or boilerplate language to discuss social and environmental concerns.

“Standards are key, so there is integrity to the reports and there is some degree of comparability,” Ms. Korngold said. “Otherwise, a lot of reports are fluff.”

For example, Molson Coors, the brewing company, included highly generalized language in last year’s annual report: “Climate change and water availability may negatively affect our business and financial results,” it said.

“Companies are reluctant to make public data about the risks they face, not only about sustainability issues, but around other issues as well,” said Jim Coburn, who runs the investor program at Ceres, a group that is also working to promote sustainability and the disclosure of environmental problems at big companies.

But change is afoot, thanks in part to the efforts of Ms. Rogers.

Her career led her to do environmental consulting at Deloitte and Arup, an engineering consultancy.

Along the way, she worked to make the sailing and swimming facilities at the Beijing Olympics more sustainable, and to prepare contaminated former military sites for commercial development.

In 2010, she and colleagues published a white paper that outlined what companies in six industries, including utilities, airlines and paper manufacturing, could do to offer more substantial environmental disclosures. They proposed that carmakers emphasize reporting on issues such as product safety, rather than, say, biodiversity, and that energy companies focus on reporting on climate change more than child labor practices.

“We were really trying to figure out what were the different issues for different industries,” Ms. Rogers said. “It was a paradigm shift in the thinking about sustainability.”

After the paper came out, investors approached Ms. Rogers about expanding her research. She quit her job at Arup the next year and did a web search on “how to start a nonprofit.” After some false starts funding the organization, she met with Daniel L. Doctoroff, then chief executive of Bloomberg LP. That led to an investment of $1 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable foundation run by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.

“We didn’t even have a bank account,” Ms. Rogers said. But soon she had temporary office space at Bloomberg’s San Francisco offices. “It was a rocket ship from that point,” she said.

Over the last few years, the standards board has worked to develop guidelines for dozens of industries, with suggestions on what types of social and environmental information cruise lines, asset managers and coal operators, among others, should report.

Companies are already required to disclose information that might be material to investors. The issue is that, until now, no one has defined which social and environmental issues are material. “The S.E.C. has very good existing rules that have been around for decades,” said Mr. Coburn of Ceres.

The S.E.C. does not need to issue a new rule for the board’s standards to become the norm. Instead, the agency could signal its desire for companies to use nonprofit’s standards in comment letters or public statements.

This summer, the agency said it would review what disclosures it required from companies and how effective they were, and invited public comment.

Letters poured in to the S.E.C. More than 66 percent of the original letters reviewed by the standards board discussed the need for greater sustainability disclosures.

“It’s very strategic what they have done,” Mr. Coburn said. “They have to get companies using their reporting standards, and there’s a lot of momentum of around climate disclosure.”

Ms. Rogers said the election of Donald J. Trump and the likely appointment conservative commissioners to the S.E.C. would not slow her momentum.

“The investor demand for this is unchanged,” she said. “Investors believe these factors are material and need better disclosure. That’s not going to change with the president.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 15, 2016, on page F12 of the New York edition with the headline: A Drive for Transparency. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe