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
Does Your Sustainability Pitch Make Enough Sense to Your CFO?
Many experts have observed in recent months that innovating for sustainability seems to be attracting mainstream attention, particularly at Fortune 500 companies and among forward-looking social entrepreneurs. The growth of the Sustainable Brands com... View More
Total Energy Resource Productivity: Math Not Myth
Open the news in the US and you hear two conflicting messages: “We are on our way to becoming energy independent using fossil fuel” and “The biggest challenge we face is getting off fossil fuel.” The inconvenient truth is that we don’t know... View More
From Invisible to Impact: Value in the Personal Data Economy
There’s been a lot of talk about the power of Big Data in our modern digital economy. But tech experts will be the first to tell you “Big Data” is a marketing term, not a magic bullet. While it’s important to know how to best aggregate and ma... View More
What Metrics Are You Using to Measure the Success of Sustainability Initiatives?
Calling all innovators & implementers! This month, Sustainable Brands will relaunch an Issue in Focus editorial channel dedicated to showcasing the New Metrics of sustainable business success (#NewMetrics).With the help of our guest editors, corp... View More
Sustainability Investing Grows Quickly, Though Measuring ROI Remains a Challenge
As a growing slice of a larger corporate push to develop more creative solutions to sustainability challenges, impact investing encourages financial actors to consider social and environmental issues when making investment decisions.These financial a... View More
Follow-Up to SB'13: Bob Willard on the Emergence of Capitalism 2.0
Bob Willard is an expert on quantifying and selling the business value of corporate sustainability strategies. He serves on the advisory boards of The Natural Step Canada and Forum for the Future US, and his fourth book, The New Sustainability Advant... View More
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 ... View More
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 an... View More
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 surv... View More
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. ... View More
What I Learned About Sustainability At REI, Part 2: Metrics Over Intuition
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
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 ... View More
New Tool Kit Helps Companies Make Better Natural Capital Decisions
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
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. ... View More
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... View More
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 ... View More
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 glo... View More
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 F... View More
EnergyPoints' Universal Metric Is Linchpin for New Integrated Reporting Application
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
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. Cabot Creamery Cooperative, a well-known dairy company, last month concluded a retrospective study in which the reliab... View More
