Metrics
Initiative ... Sustainable Business Metrics

Welcome to the 2nd annual edition of Sustainable Brands' Issues In Focus: New Metrics of Sustainable Business.

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Welcome to the World of Sustainable Business Metrics

Image credit: HIP Investor

Welcome to the 2nd annual edition of Sustainable Brands' Issues In Focus: New Metrics of Sustainable Business.

In 2011, this month-long series of written features and video content, guest-edited by HIP Investor, showcased the leaders and innovators of sustainable business value using “new metrics” that are typically ignored by Wall Street and sometimes creating a valuation gap — despite creating top-line revenue and bottom-line profit improvement, as well as mitigating potential future risks.

This year, corporate sustainability architect Bill Baue joins the team as a co-editor to shed light on new metrics focused on what the Global Reporting Initiative calls “Sustainability Context” — namely, real-world limits and thresholds, such as the capability of our global society and enterprises to use less than one earth’s equivalent of air, water, land and other shared natural resources.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

During the month of September, you will discover new breakthroughs in metrics that drive business, organizational, human, environmental and societal sustainability, and have the potential to drive financial value — in-depth case studies, interviews, and analyses from experts across multiple sectors (private and public) that are the foundation of building a better world. We are incredibly proud and excited to highlight these excellent examples of New Metrics seeking to create value for their organizations and their stakeholders. Our goal is two-fold:

Recognize the thought leaders and industry champions who are paving the way to a socially, ecologically and economically sustainable future by measuring and managing their impacts on society. Sometimes this builds more sustainable brands; or it may create a new avenue to top-line revenue (as in “trash to cash”); enhance efficiencies that can drive bottom-line profit as well as stock market and equity valuations; or potentially introduce transformative change toward a more regenerative economy.

Inspiring and evolving more New Metrics, and creating the opportunity for you, your organization and your customers to replicate what works. Every initiative profiled this month represents great progress, but the world needs us to make even greater strides to create lasting sustainability. By showing how business- and social-sector organizations use New Metrics to create value, this special edition provides the opportunity to approach your CFOs, general managers, executives and Boards with examples of “real metrics, creating real value, implemented by real brands.” We hope you will take up this challenge!

WHAT YOU CAN IMPLEMENT

In 2011, Puma pioneered the Environmental Profit and Loss (EP&L) approach in conjunction with TruCost and PwC, measuring the firm’s environmental impacts across its supply chain to quantify the “true cost” of its use of water, land, energy and other ecosystem services. Additional examples of “new metrics for sustainable business” from Campbell’s, Coca-Cola, Dow, and Ingersoll-Rand are included in this free handbook (printable version also available), which you can share with the financial experts in your organization. This year, we are hosting announcements of the first U.S.-based firm to publish their Environmental Profit and Loss (To further that theme, read about these companies that made commitments at the Rio+20 conference to measure their environmental impact).

During the first New Metrics conference at the Wharton School in Philadelphia last year, R. Paul Herman, CEO of HIP Investor, challenged all 150 attendees to be the first U.S. company to value human capital on the balance sheet. Look for an exciting announcement about an innovative firm who will declare their intention this month.

In addition, The Rhode Island Society of CPAs (RISCPA), spurred by Joy Poland of Building Bridges, is announcing a pilot program to train accountants and financial advisors to implement New Metrics of sustainability in organizations of all sizes in our country’s smallest state. This pilot seeks to implement a variety of the new metrics material shared last year. This is exactly why we are here.

WHO IS LEADING THE WAY

We’ll hear from Kevin Moss of BT, explaining its innovative Climate Stabilization Intensity (CSI) methodology; and Ben Thompson of Autodesk, which launched Corporate Finance Approach to Climate-Stabilizing Targets (C-FACT), an open-source methodology inspired by BT’s. One such company is EMC, whose Chief Sustainability Officer Kathrin Winkler explains how she modified the methodology to push it further. Bill’s colleague Mark McElroy, of the Center for Sustainable Organizations, will explain how he is pushing such an approach even further, using yet another context-based metric to assess carbon emissions at Cabot Creamery.

And Mark and Bill will preview our panel on “Standardizing Sustainability Context” at the upcoming New Metrics of Sustainable Business Conference at the Wharton School, through a dynamic dialogue with thought leaders such as Natural Logic CEO Gil Friend, Capital Institute Founder John Fullerton, TruCost Vice President Cary Krosinsky, andMurninghan Post Founder Marcy Murninghan (among others), about the strengths and challenges of implementing a context-based approach to sustainability metrics.

JOIN US EVERY DAY IN SEPTEMBER ONLINE – AND IN PHILADELPHIA ON SEPT. 27-28

Check back for new content every day in September for new, implementable business strategies and examples of New Metrics in practice, and join us in Philadelphia on the Wharton campus for the in-depth, 2-day The New Metrics of Sustainable Business Conference, produced by Sustainable Brands, on HIP Investor’s Facebook page, and on Twitter via the hashtag #NewMetrics.

We’ll be featuring thought leaders and innovators making change within their respective industries, and nothing less.

ABOUT THE GUEST EDITORS

At HIP Investor, guest-editors Nick Gower and Paul Herman and the HIP team see that when companies create value for society as well as shareholders, those firms can be more profitable and become the foundation of a stronger portfolio. HIP quantifies the human, social, and environmental impact as the “new fundamentals” of every investment and provides investment advice, impact scoring and portfolio management seeking both profit and impact.

As a corporate sustainability architect, guest editor Bill Baue works to design systemic change that integrates context-based sustainability metrics at the institutional and enterprise levels to measure progress toward operating within real-world constraints. To enhance understanding of this new approach in practice, Bill invited a handful of practitioners implementing this approach — including setting greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets that align with climate science while allowing for economic growth.