The new and evolving metrics that are helping expand the way businesses create, quantify, manage and report their impacts, and the value they deliver.
A new study of carbon emissions highlights striking differences between conventional and new, context-based sustainability metrics. [Cabot Creamery Cooperative](http://www.bcorporation.net/cabot), a well-known dairy company, last month concluded a retrospective study in which the reliability and usefulness of both varieties of metrics were examined. The [Center for Sustainable Organizations](http://www.sustainableorganizations.org) in Vermont conducted the study.
We’re scratching our heads over the Global Reporting Initiative’s recent release of the [Exposure Draft](https://www.globalreporting.org/resourcelibrary/G4/G4-Exposure-Draft.pdf) of its fourth generation of Sustainability Reporting Guidelines (dubbed “G4”).
“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.
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 in the public interest and will profit from doing so is fundamentally flawed."
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 some suggestions for how to improve them.
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 why it doesn’t. Motivated, in part, by GRI’s own [Report or Explain Campaign](http://www.globalreporting.org/CurrentPriorities/ReportOrExplain/), in which GRI exhorts businesses around the world to issue sustainability reports or explain why they don’t, our campaign was aimed at GRI itself.
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 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.
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 environmental impacts of products and services from cradle to grave.
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 rigorous form of sustainability management, it is the one upon which the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) explicitly relies in the form of what it refers to as sustainability context.
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-winning sustainability reports have a hard time putting their achievements into context, their relevance relies upon it.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think a sustainability report should actually tell us something about the sustainability performance of the organization it describes. In order to do that, though, it must include context.
On April 30, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will conduct a [second public workshop](http://www.sustainablelifemedia.com/content/story/brands/ftc_sets_sights_on_green_packaging_claims) in its continuing efforts to address the question of how sustainability claims in advertising should be handled.