Are you using context-based metrics yet?
If you’re not using context-based metrics (CBMs) in your organization’s sustainability program, you’re not measuring sustainability performance, per se. Instead, you might be measuring eco-efficiency, citizenship, philanthropy or what have you, but not sustainability performance. In order to measure sustainability performance, impacts must be measured against norms, standards or thresholds that are context-based. Let us show you how!
Even the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) calls for the inclusion of context in sustainability measurement and reporting. They call it ‘sustainability context’. When reporting on the sustainability of water use, for example, GRI states that consumption should be measured and reported ‘in relation to supply in a particular location’ (GRI G3.1). Indeed, the status of supplies translates into limits or thresholds for consumption. Exceeding such limits would be unsustainable, hence the importance of context to assessing performance.
At this point in time, all norms, standards or thresholds for sustainability performance at the level of individual organizations must be self-selected. Still, there are criteria for doing so and even self-selected standards are better than no standards. Why? Because without standards or thresholds for performance (even self-selected ones), there can be no sustainability measurement and reporting, and no sustainability management, either.
The determination of context in corporate or organizational settings is a three-step process. The first step is to determine which vital capital resources in the world an organization is having impact on, or should be having impact on, in ways that can affect stakeholder well-being. The second step is to determine whom the responsible population is for preserving, producing and/or maintaining the vital capitals involved. The third step is to determine what an organization’s proportionate duties and obligations are to have impacts on vital capitals, given the results of the first and second steps.
Once duties and obligations have been identified in the way described above, quantitative metrics can be designed in the form of quotients, in which denominators represent duty-based standards of performance and numerators represent actual levels of performance. Given the importance of context to measuring, managing and reporting sustainability performance, we believe every organization that is serious about the subject should at least be piloting, testing and evaluating one or more CBMs. Talk to us. We can show you how!