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.
Five Reasons Every Business Should Care About the New Metrics of Sustainable Business
Every now and then, as I discuss various products Sustainable Brands has to offer to our growing community of brands and solution providers, I mention our New Metrics of Sustainable Business conference and I detect either a blank stare or a confused nod. When I pause to find out why, I typically get a response gravitating around these questions: “What exactly are these New Metrics you speak of? How do they affect my company, and why should I care?”Simply put, New Metrics (#NewMetrics) is an umbrella term for the latest and most successful ways businesses are creating and capturing entirely new forms of value, or quantifying previously ignored economic, social and environmental impacts and opportunities.
Research: Calculating the Hidden Risks of Environmental Damage
A new analysis reveals that some business activities do not generate sufficient profit to cover their natural resource use and pollution costs, creating large, hidden risks that affect some industries operating in certain regions of the world. The analysis can help businesses and investors take account of natural capital costs to help manage risk and gain competitive advantage.
Elephants in the Glass House: Contextualizing Sustainability and Integrated Reporting
Cutting the fluff out of reporting by looking at some of the root causes of sustainability challenges may help stakeholders to better understand in how far the majority of companies are part of the problem or can be part of the solution to human survival.
Science-Based Carbon Targets: G4 Falters, GHG Protocol Moves Forward
Cross-Posted from Marketing and Comms. "Basing your decision to have a greenhouse gas emissions target on the fact that climate science has identified a problem, and then to turn around and set a target that doesn't reflect what that science says, for us is incongruous." That’s what Kevin Rabinovitch, global sustainability director at Mars, the privately held food and beverage company,
G4 Revamps Materiality While Staying True to Its Roots
If the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) created a semantic “heat map” of the most-used terms at its Global Conference on Sustainability and Reporting this week, Materiality would win hands-down.
Run Up to SB '13: John Havens Crowdsourcing Happiness To Save the World
John C. Havens is founder of the H(app)athon Project, a contributing writer for Mashable and
Crossing Thresholds: From Fossil Fuel Divestment to Sustainable Investment
Three cheers to Bill McKibben and 350.org for raising much-needed awareness through their campaign urging university endowments and pension funds to divest from fossil fuel-producing companies.
eBay Launches Standard for Measuring Costs, Impacts of Online Transactions
eBay has released a new Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) dashboard to monitor and analyze the cost, performance and environmental impact of customer buy and sell transactions in an effort to balance and tune its technical infrastructure, according to a recent announcement.
UK Task Force Report Explains Why Businesses, Government Should Prioritize Environmental Preservation
Today, the Ecosystem Markets Task Force (EMTF), an independent task force aimed at finding new opportunities for UK businesses to drive green economic growth, released its Final Report stating the opportunities available for businesses that properly value nature
Shell’s ‘New Lens Scenarios’ Predict Near-Zero Global Carbon Emissions by 2100
Shell released new scenarios last week that explore two possible futures with dramatically different implications for society and the world’s energy system. One scenario sees cleaner-burning natural gas becoming the most important energy source globally by the 2030s and early action to limit carbon dioxide emissions. The other sees solar becoming the top source by about 2070, but with slower action to address the threat of climate change.The New Lens Scenarios look at trends in the economy, politics and energy as far ahead as 2100, and underscore the critical role government policies could play in shaping the future.
Heinz, Colgate Divulge Forest Footprints, But Many Firms Falling Behind, Report Says
Colgate-Palmolive, Danone, Gucci and Heinz reported their forest impacts for the first time this year, but the gap between leading companies and laggards is growing, according to the fourth annual Forest Footprint Disclosure (FFD) Report.Every year FFD asks the world’s biggest firms to reveal their impact on forests based on the use of five chief commodities — soy, palm oil, timber and pulp, cattle products and biofuels. According to FFD, last year 100 companies disclosed their forest footprints, a 15 percent increase over the previous year.
Groundbreaking Cabot Study Reveals Shortcomings of Conventional Sustainability Metrics
A new study of carbon emissions highlights striking differences between conventional and new, context-based sustainability metrics.
Let’s Value People as an Asset, and Bring Financial Statements into the 21st Century
What is your organization’s most important asset? CEOs often respond that the organization’s people are its greatest asset. But if this is true, where are people accounted for in the financial statements? Today, people are generally classified as expenses on the income statement and liabilities on the balance sheet – not as an investable asset. Thus, when CEOs seek to increase profit, they cut costs – like people – rather than investing in assets – like people – that can appreciate. What Is Your Organization’s Most Important Asset?
GRI’s G4 Exposure Draft Undermines Sustainable Global Economy
We’re scratching our heads over the Global Reporting Initiative’s recent release of the Exposure Draft of Sustainability Reporting Guidelines.
GRI and Sustainability Context: Explain It Like We’re Four
“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.
Clarifying the Business Case for Sustainability and CSR
Michael Porter and Mark Kramer once wrote: "No business can solve all of society’s problems or bear the cost of doing so."
Are Materiality Matrices Really Material?
While it is common practice now for corporate sustainability reports to include materiality matrices, whether or not they actually serve their purpose is debatable.
GRI Responds to "Enforce or Explain"
GRI has now formally responded to the *Enforce or Explain* campaign we launched last month.
A Public Plea to GRI: Enforce or Explain
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.
Do LCAs Measure Up To Sustainability?
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.
