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New Metrics

The new and evolving metrics that are helping expand the way businesses create, quantify, manage and report their impacts, and the value they deliver.

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The Implications of an Emerging Corporate Conscience for Business Metrics: Part 15

In 14 earlier parts of this series, Claire Sommer and I developed 26 pitfalls in the sustainable business metrics field, based on the experiences of many mostly non-business fields (Find them here.)

OK ... Now What? The Future of Natural Capital Accounting Metrics

Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) is an emerging methodology in the private sector, aimed at measuring the dependency and impact of companies on natural systems. NCA helps in quantifying the value of usually intangible assets from nature (such as water, pollination, etc). NCA allows mitigating risks but also identifies opportunities to reduce costs, innovate and become more resilient.

UPS Halfway to Driving 1 Billion Miles With Clean Fuel Fleet By 2017

UPS logged 154 million miles in 2014 toward its goal of driving 1 billion miles with its alternative fuel and advanced technology fleet by the end of 2017 — an almost threefold increase from 2013, according to the company’s 13th annual Sustainability Report.To put this into perspective: it took 13 years for the company to drive the first 350 million miles with its alternative fuel and advanced technology fleet, but in just one year UPS was able to build dramatically on that number and is now more than halfway to its 2017 goal.

Carbon Trust Launches Water Footprint Certification Scheme

The Carbon Trust announced Monday it is piloting a new Water Footprint label and certification scheme. It is now inviting businesses to certify their water use assessments with the scheme, using the Water Footprint Network’s methodology or the ISO water footprint standard.

How Much Water to Make a Cup of Tea? The Importance of Product Water Footprinting for Businesses

Like most British people, I enjoy a nice cup of tea. And like most practitioners of life cycle assessment (a far smaller group), I’m very interested in understanding the full impact of the products I consume.So how much water goes into a cup of tea? Somewhere around 30 litres of water is required for tea itself, 10 litres for a small dash of milk and a further 6 litres for each teaspoon of sugar. This means that a simple cup of tea with milk and two sugars could actually require 52 litres of water – enough to fill my kettle more than 30 times.

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Natural Capital Coalition Releases Stakeholder Feedback Report, Draft Protocol

The Natural Capital Coalition has released an extensive report on business expectations around the Natural Capital Protocol, its standardized framework for measuring impact and dependence on natural ecosystems. Due to be published next year, the Protocol will provide decision-making support to businesses in their risk-management processes, exploration of new revenue streams, and in product and value chain innovation.

How Do You Get Other Departments to Listen? Let Your Colleagues Run With Your Ideas

In the sustainability field, in contrast to other fields, it is the biggest possible compliment to no longer be needed in a discussion because your colleague in purchasing is already covering your topics. But how do you get your colleagues to not just listen to your ideas, but to consider them worth working towards?Ideally, your colleagues would not only acknowledge sustainability topics, but run with them. That tells you that something is changing. The companies making the biggest changes are those where everybody feels responsible — from the cleaning lady to the purchasing department. But how can you work towards this?

Why Corporate Responsibility Has the Potential to Deliver Financial, Competitive Returns

I’ve been working in the Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility (CR) field for twenty years. In that time, skeptics have persistently challenged the discipline: Do corporate environmental, social, and governance practices drive or distract from tangible financial, competitive, and wider business performance?On the one hand, anyone who attended SB’15 in San Diego should celebrate the present as the best of times to answer this question. Eyes are opening – backed by rigorous assessment – on the financial and wider competitive potential of low-carbon innovations, circular economic and other breakthrough economic strategies, and base of the pyramid development.

Report: Sustainability Innovation Powering Business Growth

Revenues from company-defined portfolios of sustainable products and services grew by 91 percent between 2010 and 2013, according to a new report by The Conference Board, a public interest research association.For S&P Global 100 companies that break out revenue for sustainable products or services separately, that revenue stream grew at six times the rate of overall company results.

From Theory to Practice: Phase 3 of the Roundtable for Product Social Metrics

Back in 2013, PRé and seven frontrunner companies developed a vision to create a standardised and trusted methodology to assess the social impacts of products. Creating such a methodology together would avoid the drawbacks of each company developing its own methodology. Two years later, the Roundtable for Product Social Metrics has reached its third phase.The aim of the product social footprinting methodology was not only to measure and reduce social risks in the supply chain but also to identify improvement opportunities, reduce the social footprint of products and drive innovation.

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Trending: New Benchmark, Indices Show Continued Momentum Behind Impact Investing

Private impact investment funds — specifically private equity and venture capital funds — that pursue social impact objectives have recorded financial returns in line with a comparative universe of funds that only pursue financial returns, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis from global investment advisor Cambridge Associates (CA) and the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN).

Sustainability Mythbusters: Is Packaging Always a ‘Bad Guy’?

In the sustainability arena, we are used to work with a diversity of common sustainability assumptions. However, some of the assumptions that we trust might not be as right as we think they are. A critical eye is required before we consider basing our work on one of these assumptions. As a science-based method, LCA is an excellent tool to bust some of the myths that surround sustainability. With this piece, we kick off the “Sustainability Mythbusters” series and start exploring the most common sustainability assumptions to see if they are true or just myths. Let’s start checking the impact of packaging.

Ecolab Helped Customers Save 115 Billion Gallons of Water in 2014

Ecolab’s efforts to help customers reduce, reuse, manage and treat water more efficiently led to a savings of 115 billion gallons of water in 2014, according to the company’s 2014 Corporate Sustainability Report, released Thursday.The company also launched the Water Risk Monetizer, a free public tool designed to help change the way water is valued and managed by all water users.Ecolab says its mission is “to provide and protect what is vital: clean water, safe food, abundant energy and healthy environments.” Through partnerships with customers, NGOs and communities, the company helps address some of the world’s most urgent resource and business challenges.

Reports Show We're Beginning to Understand, Quantify Our Dependence on Ecosystems

Researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) on Monday outlined in a series of reports how governments, organizations and corporations are successfully moving away from short-term exploitation of the natural world and embracing a long-term vision of “nature as capital” — the ultimate world bank upon which the health and prosperity of humans and the planet depend.The reports, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that significant progress has been made in the past decade, and that people, policy-makers and leaders around the world are beginning to understand ecosystem services as far more than a tree to cut or fish to harvest.

Criteria That Positively Affect the ROI of Sustainable Tourism

Ireland has made positive strides in sustainable tourism in the last decade, including the development of a globally recognized tourism eco-certification program and the Wild Atlantic Way touring route filled with agritourism food trails, naturalist-guided adventure activities and environmentally conscious boutique hotels.

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#SB15sd: How to Stay Afloat in Water Management

Led by Val Fishman, VP of Corporate Partnerships for the Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF), this panel congregated some of the most influential organizations that are driving change and collaboration within water stewardship. It also congregated a full room, which is not surprising considering that water scarcity has been pushed under the spotlight, having been named this year's top global risk by the World Economic Forum.

How Can We Assess the Future-Fitness, or True Sustainability, of Our Businesses?

Geoff Kendall, co-founder and CEO of the Future-Fit Foundation, set the stage by calling into question most of the existing sustainability performance metrics, which he believes are sending business leaders and investors the wrong signals; “if someone with the illustrious name of Dow Jones can tell the CEO and investors of an oil company that it is 85 percent sustainable, something is wrong.” Kendall explained why existing approaches to performance metrics are limited: 1) some metrics measure progress relative to a baseline year but this does not tell us where a company should be; 2) other metrics evaluate companies relative to best practice or peers but that encourages compan

Tennaxia-SASB Partnership Simplifies Sustainability Data for Companies, Investors

A new partnership between data management company Tennaxia and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) may make it easier for companies to measure, manage and report on the sustainability data most essential for financial performance and value creation.By integrating SASB standards into Tennaxia’s software platform, companies will be able to track industry-specific metrics material to financial performance, alongside a broad range of CSR data and reporting frameworks. C-suite management and investors can have access to a ‘total mix’ of information needed to make decisions.

Science- vs. Context-Based Metrics – What’s the Difference?

As the importance of measurement and reporting in sustainability continues to grow, it should be helpful, I think, to clarify the distinction between so-called science- and context-based metrics. These terms are not synonymous, although they do overlap. More important is the fact that science-based thinking is by no means sufficient for purposes of setting goals or measuring performance in organizational sustainability — necessary, perhaps, but insufficient.

Announcing The Product Social Footprinting Programme

During my past five years at PRé, I’ve observed how companies approach different issues. I’m very interested in social impact assessment, and I experienced that companies have wildly different approaches for assessing the social impacts of their products and services, and for managing product social sustainability.

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