Methods

1. Natura Chronologies 

Natura has been a pioneer of sustainability almost since its creation. The organization has created a positive social and environmental impact throughout the expansion of their chain activities to a more sustainable form of reporting. The company has implemented the usage of integrated reporting for means of combining their financial (Annual) and sustainability reports in a single form. The main benefit from this type of report is the conscious communication about how an organization's strategy, governance and performance, in the context of its external environment, lead to the creation of shared value in the short and long-run related to their business process activities. 

Natura's sustainability practices and their form of reporting on the environment, social and financial issues are the subjects of our case study. In an effort to the development of a wider scope of Natura’s sustainability initiatives, the addition of some other sustainable concepts viewed in class were required. Natura’s data collection procedures include secondary data obtained from the organization 2016, 2017 and 2018 integrated reports. These reports were evaluated through the GRI framework and data on Natura's product innovation, their results on TBL, and created shared value were analyzed and concluded.

For the development of our project, we have also analyzed other concepts and their relationship of how the company can implement them to have a wider positive sustainable outcome within their business process. The additional concepts learned in class were circular economy, ESG issues, LCA, sustainable information systems, system thinking and crowdsourcing which were applied to our company and were shown its respective outcomes in the data analysis part of the report. The concepts were assigned through chapters 11, 12, 13, and 16 from our course’s book and the remaining concepts were learned through some articles provided by our instructor. 

2. Data Collection Procedures: Secondary Data

Integrated Reporting 

Integrated Reporting is a new initiative implemented by Natura to combine their  annual and sustainability reports, which are prepared in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and following the GRI standards, for means of the organization to accomplish its commitment to transparency. Since Integrated Reporting is part of the company reporting process, organized for more than 100 indicators, it covers the different areas of the company such as its sustainability and financial performance as well as the company GRI aligned reports.  This report also includes a printed magazine, which emphasized the main activities done by the company in the period covered and performance report with the purpose to update the performance of the company’s main social, environmental and financial indicators. Overall, the reports cover information about the company's social-environmental and financial activities in Brazil and Latin America. 

3. Results

As a result of the implementation of the concepts learned from out GBUS class and the data collected from Natura’s integrated reporting, we were able to better understand the company’s assessments in each section of the report, referred to their sustainability and financial aspects , and we were also capable of identify some lacks in some aspects of Natura’s business activities and products distribution. By this, we concluded that Natura is an amazing eco-brand which cares not just in making profit out of their production activities, but to benefit people and planet as well.