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.
Context-Based Metrics Needed to Create Sustainability Value
Recently, DNV GL announced the results of our latest Tomorrow’s ValueTM Rating (TVR), a benchmark of global best practice in sustainability. For the 11th year in a row, we evaluated how well companies understand their risks and opportunities — and how prepared they are to create future business value through sustainable business practices.
The Next 5 Challenges to Sustainable Investing
Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) is a growing force in markets across the world. According to the US SIF Foundation, the responsible investing market in the US increased 486 percent while the broader US market of professionally managed assets grew 376 percent between 1995 and 2012. SRI investments are generally demand-side driven. More and more investors are looking for vehicles that are aligned with their values and priorities. In 2014, the total Assets Under Management (AUM) of the 1,278 signatories of the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), which include asset owners, investment managers and professional service partners, totaled $45 trillion. The SRI niche is not going away.
#NewMetrics '14: NYC Just One Example of Cities Furthering Sustainability Engagement
“How do you get buy-in and get the resources to implement a sustainability campaign? How can you prioritize this over firehouses being shut down and teachers’ salaries? We need data and research.” — Roya KazemiOn Friday, the final day of #NewMetrics '14, Roya Kazemi — director of GreeNYC for the NYC Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability — led a candid and engaging conversation about public-private partnerships at the city level. Session attendees brought their own examples from the cities of Copenhagen, Vancouver, Lexington, North Carolina, and closer to home in Lowell and Cambridge, Mass.
#NewMetrics '14: TD Bank, Intel, CA Technologies, WeSpire Share Employee Impact Case Studies
Rounding out the final afternoon of Sustainable Brands’ New Metrics ‘14, Susan Hunt Stevens, founder & CEO of WeSpire, led a candid, data-rich conversation with representatives from TD Bank, Intel and CA Technologies about their employee engagement programs.“These three people are doing really amazing work not only in employee engagement, but more importantly, connecting employee engagement to broader business value and key HR metrics,” Stevens said.
#NewMetrics '14 Panel Explores Data-Derived Solutions to Top Global Supply Chain Risks
It’s Friday afternoon at New Metrics ’14, and next on the agenda is a workshop offering data-based insights and recommendations on top global supply chains risks from specialists in the field.The conversation was co-led by Andrew Savini, Manager of Supplier Management & Audits at Intertek, and Mark Robertson, Head of Marketing & Communications at Sedex, who shared their companies’ data analyses of supply chain risks and real-world experience.
#NewMetrics ’14 Panel Showcases Tools for All of Your Data-Tracking, -Visualizing and -Interpreting Needs
Straight through to the end of the final day, #NewMetrics ’14 continued to introduce ideas and tools for gathering intelligence from previously unavailable or unusable data, as panelists from all over the world gathered to share their experiences, tools, tips and lessons learned.
#NewMetrics ’14: Leveraging the World's Brains, Wallets, Data for Solutions to Pressing Problems
There is power in the data that a crowd can provide — business- and future-shaping data. The final breakout session at Sustainable Brands’ New Metrics ‘14 conference in Boston highlighted definitions and examples of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing to achieve a stated social purpose. The following four approaches to big data are exciting experiments in social change driven by the crowd.
#NewMetrics '14: Kingsbury Navigates Vast Landscape of Tools, Imagines ‘Uber Tool’ for Chemical Evaluation
“Sustainability is about being multidisciplinary. If you only look at a narrow slice or issue, you will not find a sustained solution.” — Tony KingsburyChemical expert Tony Kingsbury’s Friday afternoon breakout session on his leading-edge research into chemical evaluation tools and certifications asked us all to consider the products around us and how much we truly know. The session led attendees through his journey to uncover what an overload of chemical evaluation tools means for experts, companies and consumers.
#NewMetrics '14 Day 3 Highlights Power of Consumers to Change Brand Behavior ... and Vice Versa
Bill BaueThe final morning of Sustainable Brands’ New Metrics ’14 conference started with an invitation from MC Bill Baue, co-founder of the Sustainability Context Group, to imagine “what if?” sustainability pioneer Donella Meadows were in the room and what she would say.
2-Part #NewMetrics '14 Panel Shines Light on Sustainability Context in Practice
A two-part session on Thursday afternoon explored sustainability context through examining the evolution of corporate sustainability goals, and case studies from leading companies proactively applying it to their goal-setting processes.First, Sustainability Context Group co-founder Bill Baue — moderator of both parts — led a discussion on the state of corporate sustainability goals and equipping companies with practical advice on how to incorporate context.
#New Metrics '14: The Next Frontier of ESG Research and Ratings
“I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.” — Ben FranklinWhy should companies bother with ratings? They show leadership and scale. This second-wave afternoon workshop on day 2 of New Metrics ‘14 delved into this concept in detail, revealing insights into recent developments in ESG ratings, and what they mean for companies and brands.
#NewMetrics ’14 Panel Explores Progress, Lessons, Challenges of Integrated Reporting
This afternoon workshop on day 2 of #NewMetrics caught attendees up with the latest from early adopters of integrated reporting. Practitioners have always aimed to derive the best way to report status, progress and value of sustainability work, but the Holy Grail of processes has been elusive. Four leaders in this area gathered in this session to discuss the lessons and challenges from their experience of adopting integrated reporting.
Greendex 2014: Increased Fears About Environment Not Reflected in Consumer Behavior
National Geographic’s 2014 Greendex, released today by the National Geographic Society and GlobeScan, finds that concern about environmental problems has increased in most countries surveyed, and that more people expect that global warming will negatively affect them during their lifetime than in 2012. Despite this, the survey — a comprehensive measure of consumer behavior in 65 areas related to housing, transportation, food and consumer goods — shows that corresponding consciousness in consumer behavior has only grown slowly.
#NewMetrics '14 Panel Dives Into #SocialFootprint Approach for Ensuring Product Sustainability
Thursday, the second afternoon at Sustainable Brands’ New Metrics ’14 conference, featured a follow-up deep dive session into the topic of one of the morning’s well-received plenary presentations — how to quantify a product’s “social footprint” as a next step in assessing sustainability.While the sustainability field has developed many ways to assess products’ environmental footprints, until now few tools have helped accurately measure the social impacts that products have on workers, local communities, suppliers, consumers and more throughout their life cycle.
Plenaries Unveil Next-Gen Goal-Setting Frameworks, Groundbreaking Product Assessments on #NewMetrics '14 Day 2
It is no secret that markets are starting to demand a more complete picture of businesses' interactions with environmental and social realities of the world — a new, expanded set of success factors and risks to inform key stakeholders — or simply #NewMetrics. How New Metrics are conceived, brought to life, communicated effectively, and perfected over time, are the key questions metrics experts in the Sustainable Brands community are tackling this week at New Metrics '14, taking place in Cambridge, MA, in partnership with the Sustainability Initiative at the MIT Sloan School of Business.
#NewMetrics ’14: Catching Up with SASB
The third morning workshop on Wednesday, day one of New Metrics ’14, at MIT Sloan School of Business, gave us a closer look at the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), its process and its progress to date since its founding in 2012.
#NewMetrics ’14 Workshop Reveals Secrets to Effective Employee Engagement
There is a disconnect between what we are doing for the environment and how we are treating our people, and four thought leaders in integrating the two gathered Wednesday at New Metrics ‘14 to share solutions on solving that gap.Key Thought: Engagement Delivers Value
#NewMetrics '14: LCA — Not Just for Carbon Footprinting Anymore
At a conference on New Metrics, it seems fitting to begin with a discussion of the current state of life cycle analysis (LCA), one of the earliest quantitative tools that practitioners had for measuring impact. Initially applied to a narrow set of functions such as carbon footprinting, today’s LCA has evolved to incorporate expanded dimensions, issues and scale, as we learned in this half-day workshop on the morning of day one.
#NewMetrics '14 Workshop Explores Next-Generation, Web-Based Sustainability Tools
In the world of CSR, tools enable practitioners to extend capabilities; when we think differently, we can do differently. In the new and ever evolving world of sustainability, understanding how we can use tools to do better at answering the questions of the field will enable progress. Leaders in this burgeoning area gathered Wednesday morning at MIT Sloan, day one of the New Metrics ’14 conference, for a workshop to discuss new, easy-to-use tools aimed at supporting and enhancing the work of sustainability practitioners in every field, and the impacts of access to new, accurate and verifiable data.
Global Shift to Mass Transit Can Save $100 Trillion by 2050
More than $100 trillion in cumulative public and private spending, and 1,700 megatons of annual carbon dioxide (CO2) — a 40 percent reduction of urban passenger transport emissions — could be eliminated by 2050 if the world expands public transportation, walking and cycling in cities, according to a new report released by the University of California, Davis, and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP).In addition, an estimated 1.4 million early deaths could be avoided annually by 2050 if governments began requiring the strongest vehicle pollution controls and ultralow-sulfur fuels, according to a related analysis of these urban vehicle activity pathways by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) included in the report.
