What differentiates CSO from others in the sustainability arena is its strong commitment to an approach for corporate sustainability measurement, management and reporting that is context- and multicapital-based.
The Center for Sustainable Organizations (CSO) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation created in 2004 by its founder and Executive Director, Mark W. McElroy, Ph.D. Its purpose is to conduct research, development, training and consulting for, and with, companies around the world interested in improving the sustainability performance of their operations.
What differentiates CSO from others in the sustainability arena is its strong commitment to an approach for corporate sustainability measurement, management and reporting that is context-based (i.e., that interprets sustainability performance in terms of impacts on vital capital resources relative to norms, standards or thresholds for what such impacts would have to be in order to be sustainable).
CSO’s founder and Executive Director, Mark W. McElroy, Ph.D., is also board chair emeritus of the Donella Meadows Institute in Norwich, VT, and formerly led the Center for Sustainability Performance at Deloitte Consulting in Waltham, MA. Mark is also affiliated with the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, where he developed the Social Footprint Method as the subject of his doctoral dissertation in 2008. In addition to his work with CSO, Mark also teaches in the Managing for Sustainability MBA program at Marlboro College in Vermont.
3 years ago - At the heart of the Certified TBL program is its advocacy of multicapital- and context-based Triple Bottom Line accounting, still new to most organizations but rapidly emerging as the gold standard for measurement and reporting.
11 years ago - “Now, explain it to me like I’m a four year old,” says Denzel Washington to Tom Hanks in the 1993 film Philadelphia. We pose this same question to the Global Reporting Initiative, the standard-setter for sustainability reporting.
11 years ago - While it is common practice now for corporate sustainability reports to include materiality matrices, whether or not they actually serve their purpose is debatable.
11 years ago - GRI has now formally responded to the *Enforce or Explain* campaign we launched last month.
11 years ago - Motivated, in part, by GRI’s own Report or Explain Campaign, in which GRI exhorts businesses around the world to issue sustainability reports or explain why they don’t, our campaign is aimed at GRI itself.
11 years ago - Despite the growing use of life cycle assessments to measure the sustainability of products, a strong case can be made that the one has less to do with the other than most people think.
11 years ago - CBS is not only the most intellectually rigorous form of sustainability management, it is the one upon which the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) explicitly relies in the form of what it refers to as sustainability context.
13 years ago - While even award-winning sustainability reports have a hard time putting their achievements into context, their relevance relies upon it.
13 years ago - Call me old-fashioned, but I think a sustainability report should actually tell us something about the sustainability performance of the organization it describes.