Davos really is the best place on earth to hold a beauty contest and what is more beautiful than sustainability? Every year for the past four, Corporate Knights and Innovest announce the global 100 most sustainable companies in the world at Davos and for the 2008 list tonight is the night. You can find the press release and the full list here.

The ratings agency Innovest carry out the research for this list and the methodology is clearly rigorous. The list represents category leaders in terms of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) risk and opportunity management relative to peers out of universe of 1800 securities of MSCI World-listed companies. What's even more hair raising about it is the tremendous rate of churn each year and this year is no different with a churn of 30%. You can view the turnover lists here.

Interesting to see so many big names in the banking industry dropped including HSBC, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, ABN Amro. Out too is Henkel who produce one of the finest CSR reports in Germany if not Europe in terms of methodology. A notable deletion from the tech sector is Google.

Notable additions to the list include Honda, Nestle, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Post, L'Oreal, Rio Tinto, State Street and Societe Generale.

The IT & Telco sector breakout is as follows:

Nokia Corporation
Finland
Information Technology

Tietoenator OYJ
Finland
Information Technology

SAP AG
Germany
Information Technology

Ricoh Company Limited
Japan
Information Technology

Electrocomponents PLC
United Kingdom
Information Technology

Advanced Micro Devices
United States
Information Technology

Agilent Technologies Inc
United States
Information Technology

Hewlett-Packard Company
United States
Information Technology

Intel Corp.
United States
Information Technology

NTT Docomo Inc
Japan
Telecommunication Services

BT Group PLC
United Kingdom
Telecommunication Services

Cable & Wireless PLC
United Kingdom
Telecommunication Services

Of course, I'm really pleased to see SAP again in this list but know we will have to again work hard to stay within the G100 in 2009.