The new and evolving metrics that are helping expand the way businesses create, quantify, manage and report their impacts – and the value they deliver
This is the second in a series of posts on things I learned while leading Corporate Social Responsibility at REI for the past seven years (read part one). ... View More
John C. Havens is founder of the H(app)athon Project, a contributing writer for Mashable and ... View More
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) last week released a new toolkit to help businesses assess, measure and value the natural capital used throughout their operations. ... View More
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. ... View More
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... View More
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 ... View More
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 glo... View More
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 F... View More
Software company EnergyPoints unveiled a new application this week designed to enable businesses to issue a single, integrated sustainability report that conveys both the financial and environmental impact of a company’s energy and resource consump... View More
A new study of carbon emissions highlights striking differences between conventional and new, context-based sustainability metrics. Cabot Creamery Cooperative, a well-known dairy company, last month concluded a retrospective study in which the reliab... View More
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... View More
We’re scratching our heads over the Global Reporting Initiative’s recent release of the Exposure Draft of its fourth generation of Sustainability Reporting Guidelines (dubbed “G4”). ... View More
“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. ... View More
Michael Porter and Mark Kramer once wrote: "No business can solve all of society’s problems or bear the cost of doing so." Striking a similar chord, Aneel Karnani later said: "...the idea that companies have a responsibility to act i... View More
While it is common practice now for corporate sustainability reports to include materiality matrices, whether or not they actually serve their purpose is debatable. Indeed, we (the Center for Sustainable Organizations) don't think they do, and have s... View More
GRI has now formally responded to the Enforce or Explain campaign we (the Center for Sustainable Organizations) launched last month in which we suggested that it either enforce the ‘sustainability context’ principle in its Guidelines, or explain ... View More
Earlier this month, we (the Center for Sustainable Organizations) issued a press release in which we called for GRI to either enforce the ‘sustainability context’ requirement in its standard, or explain why it doesn’t. Motivated, in part, by GR... View More
Despite the growing use of LCAs (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. By design, LCAs provide a way of quantifying the environm... View More
As some readers of this column may already know, I have for the past several years been advocating for the adoption of an approach to sustainability management known as context-based sustainability, or CBS. CBS is not only the most intellectually ri... View More
Ahead of his breakout session on Strengthening Your Brand with Context Based Sustainability at Sustainable Brands '09, Mark McElroy writes on The Global Reporting Initiative's (GRI) call for context in all sustainability reporting. While even award-w... View More