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.
Natural Capital Impact Group Develops Single Biodiversity Metric to Help Companies Reduce Impacts
Sustainability driven business is the way of the future, but getting there is no small undertaking. To make it easier for companies to reduce their environmental impacts, businesses such as Kering, Interserve, Mars and Asda have banded together to develop a new healthy ecosystem metric designed to support companies as they make the transition to a more sustainable business model.
The Road to Context: What You Need to Know About Contextual Strategy and Goal-Setting (Part 2)
In Part 1 of this series exploring contextual strategy-making and goal-setting, we shared how our work with the corporate members of the Embedding Project, and their interest in understanding how to make sense of the methodologies, frameworks, tools and ideas around sustainability context, led us to develop our free “Road to Context” guide.
Q&A: How Quantis Is Driving the Paradigm Shift Towards Science-Based Targets
Following the ratification of the Paris Agreement last fall, companies have become increasingly aware of the need to adopt strong sustainability strategies that have the ability to create real, meaningful change. But to do so requires starting from a solid foundation, one that is informed by a company’s core sustainability challenges and an understanding of planetary boundaries.
Do Sustainability Metrics Foster Incremental vs Transformational Change?: Part 20
In 19 earlier parts of this series, Claire Sommer,Jill Lipotiand I developed 38 pitfalls in the sustainable business metrics field, based on the experiences of many mostly non-business fields (Find themhere.).
Reporting 3.0 ‘Data Blueprint’ Explores Future of Integral Information Systems
This is part two of a four-part series on themes explored at the upcoming 4th International Reporting 3.0 Conference. Read part one here.
Reporting 3.0 ‘Positive Maverick’ Community Pushes Context-Based Multicapitalism
This is part one of a four-part series on themes explored at the upcoming 4th International Reporting 3.0 Conference.
The Road to Context: What You Need to Know About Contextual Strategy and Goal-Setting (Part 1)
It seems like 2017 is becoming the year of ‘context,’ as the incorporation of sustainability context edges its way into more and more panel conversations and into leading corporate practice.
Measuring True Impact: Why Science Is Redefining Our Definition of a Sustainable Company
Big changes for better outcomes Businesses today are realizing that to truly address the environmental and social challenges that affect our world, a major shift is required in the way they produce and market products and services.
New Tool Aims to Assess Landscape-Level Forest Sustainability
As with most industries these days, companies in paper and packaging know that their customers — be they publishers, fast food companies or office suppliers — want to buy products that are deemed sustainable. They know that millions of dollars can depend on whether their products can meet this threshold.
TD, NCC Assign Economic Value to Ecological Services of Canada’s Forests
Adding to the growing body of research highlighting the value of forests for mitigating climate change, the TD Bank Group (TD) and the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) have released a new report that assigns an economic value to the ecological goods and services forests provide to Canadians.
Norway Earns Top Spot in 2017 World Happiness Report
With its narrow economic focus, GDP has long been considered a poor measure of human welfare and progress. Several alternatives have been developed over the years to more accurately measure the well-being of a population, including Gross National Happiness (GNH), which uses the collective happiness of a nation as its main development indicator.
Introducing Aggregate Capital Sufficiency (ACS) – A New Alternative to GDP
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has long been debunked as a measure of human welfare.
Consumption-Based Metrics: The Next Challenge for Zero-Waste Cities
Cities are major contributors to – and battlegrounds of – climate change. According to a report from the UN Habitat, cities pump out roughly 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions whilst just occupying just 2 percent of the Earth’s land.
Richard Howitt on a Sustainability-Inclusive IIRC: I'm Up for the Challenge!
This post is a response to a challenge posed earlier this year to new IIRC Chief Executive Richard Howitt by Dr. Mark W. McElroy and Martin P. Thomas, co-authors of The Multicapital Scorecard (2016). The goal to make Integrated Reporting the global norm in corporate reporting is indeed at a breakthrough moment.
3 Key Resources for Benchmarking Your Sustainability Program
What better time to benchmark your sustainability program than the start of the year? Evaluating whether your program is following best practices can spur improvement and provide justification for prioritizing initiatives. This helps determine whether teams are headed in the right direction and moving with enough momentum to meet the sustainability challenges of the future and drive business value. With growing evidence demonstrating the business case for sustainability, such as $8 billion earned in one year by a sample of 150 companies, there are compelling reasons to gauge your program’s health.
BBC Employs Alberta Scheme to Track Carbon Footprint, Reduce Environmental Impacts
While the fashion, food, auto and energy industries are held to high sustainability standards, television tends to fly under the radar. But environmental sustainability is an important issue to networks and producers across the globe. Sky was the first broadcaster to fully embed the Albert carbon calculator tool for screen art production into its commissioning process, and now the BBC is moving forward with plans to employ the scheme across its programming.
Context and Capitals – The Next Big Things in Corporate Sustainability
You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” - Joseph Goldstein Context is a game-changer for sustainability professionals and for the businesses that they work with. A dramatic statement is often a good way to start an article – and sometimes they are justified; this piece explains why I think that context heralds big changes for the practice of sustainability and CSR.
Is it Time to Add Morality to the Business Case for Sustainability?
Every manager (or consultant) who has pitched an initiative under the banner of “sustainability” has faced the same question nearly every time: What’s the business case? On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with the question. Business is all about allocating some form of capital, be it financial, human or organizational. So it’s not unfair to wonder what the return on the investment might be. But usually, when executives pose the question about sustainability initiatives, they’re asking about the business case in the narrowest sense: Does this thing pay back, in cash, within some short payback period (1 or 2 years)?
With the Changing of the Guard at the IIRC, a Challenge to Richard Howitt
Update: Read Richard's response here.
New Study Links 'Green' Buildings to Higher Cognitive Function
Can better thinking and better health be found in green-certified buildings? New research says yes. Both indoors and out, the built environment plays a critical role in our overall health and well-being. This is especially true as about 90 percent of our time is spent indoors, and buildings have the ability to positively and negatively influence human health. Now, a new study by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health and the Global Environment and SUNY Upstate Medical University has found a link between green buildings and improved cognitive function.