Trucost worked with Defra (the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) to produce the latest guidance on environmental reporting: Environmental KPIs - Reporting Guidelines for UK Business. These Guidelines are designed to help businesses address their most significant environmental impacts and report on them in a way that meets the needs of current regulation, such as the Business Review and forthcoming requirements under the Companies Act.

Elliot Morley, Environment Minister, says: "hese Guidelines seek to set a standard which will give business some assurance that it has reported its environmental performance to an appropriate minimum level of accuracy and detail."

The purpose of the Guidelines is threefold:

• To give clear guidance to companies on how to report on their environmental performance using environmental KPIs
• To define which KPIs are most relevant to which sectors
• To set out the business rationale for managing environmental performance using KPIs

Trucost helps companies identify their appropriate environmental KPIs using these Guidelines and its assessment of a company's environmental impacts in terms of external damage costs. It has worked with many leading companies including Avis, Burren Energy, Bloomsbury Publishing, Conoco Phillips, DHL, Legal & General, LogicaCMG and Prudential. Trucost's framework allows environmental impacts to be compared to financial performance indicators – a unique, quantitative approach.