Financial Pillar of Sustainability

Today’s economic climate demands that organizations carry out investment strategies that reduce costs, optimize efficiencies and mitigate risks. Increasingly and fortunately, the execution of these strategies is in alignment with long term sustainability. Sustainability may be important for society and the planet, but it also presents organizations with potential for new growth and improved services. Sustainability initiatives can help organizations reduce costs in a carbon-sensitive world, find new resources, reduce costly inefficiencies and streamline operations.

According the Ceres Report, The 21st Century Corporation: The Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability, the investor perspective is that “the bottom line for business is that investors are rewarding companies that understand how sustainability issues impact their business and that are implementing strategies and actions that will enable them to thrive in a sustainable global economy.”

The report continues on to suggest that there is an expectation that companies will invest the necessary resources to achieve environmental neutrality and to make demonstrable efforts towards social responsibility across their operations. Companies will measure and improve performance related to greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency, facilities and buildings, water, waste, and human rights.

With the ever-increasing requirement to achieve sustainable results, organizations are turning to solutions that facilitate the process of addressing these opportunities. At the very highest levels of the organization, The C-Suite, Boards and Administrations are seeking the backdrop of knowledge about their current operations in order to identify the opportunities for significant change and optimal investment.

With a Sustainable Performance Solution you have transparency, accountability and stewardship of assets as well as the ability to benchmark, monitor and verify operating performance. From investment analysis to lifecycle planning and on-going performance management, sustainable performance management presents a standard model for defining, measuring, implementing and supporting financial decisions. Organizations possess the required understanding and knowledge to make informed investment decisions and implement strategies which produce positive bottom line results and achieve sustainability goals.

Energy Pillar of Sustainability

In today’s environment, organizations must not only make improvements in their energy performance, they must consider these initiatives as strategic opportunities. Mounting pressure to reduce energy consumption, combined with volatile fuel supply and cost, is driving organizations to improve energy management policies and practices.

This perspective is in alignment with the published Ceres Report, The 21st Century Corporation: The Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability. The report provides a practical roadmap for integrating sustainability into the DNA of business – from the Boardroom, to copy rooms, and across entire supply chains. It calls for significant performance improvements from companies by 2020. Among the report’s 20 key expectations for companies:

• Make energy efficiency and renewable energy the foundation for company operations
• Implement closed-loop systems so that air and wastewater emissions are eliminated and zero waste is produced
• Require 75 percent of top tier suppliers to meet company sustainability performance standards
• Dedicate 50 percent of R&D investment to developing sustainability solutions
• Compensate and provide incentives for top executives and other employees to drive sustainability into the business

The report makes it clear that the global economy has unprecedented challenges, whether from soaring population growth, resource constraints or a changing global climate that will require massive investment in low-carbon technology. Many companies recognize these emerging challenges and are already incorporating them into their planning and turning to sustainable financial performance.

Environmental Pillar of Sustainability

Global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions, demand for alternative energy sources and the need to protect food/water supplies are among the critical issues that require swift universal action. Organizations today are seeking approaches that enable them to play a role in the solution to climate change. They need to be able to make smart environmental choices by having access to the information by which to make educated decisions and particularly in light of the current changing economic environment, understand the value of making “green” investments.

Competing priorities can only temporarily be an excuse for inaction or lack of direction. But ultimately, by showing leadership and innovation, there are bona-fide opportunities to make environmentally-based smart choices that will provide commercial, financial and reputational benefits. This is no longer radical thinking — it is the new norm that organizations need to embrace as they adopt a lower carbon mentality.

Environmental initiatives however, must be considered in the context of the organizational and operational conditions. Having an effective, predictive process to analyze the priorities, execute a plan, and measure the key performance indicators is the basis for decisions and a framework that can transform raw information into valuable knowledge about environmental impact.

Social Pillar of Sustainability

In this era of stewardship and increased social responsibility, accountability and transparency is crucial. The impacts of the economy, global war on terror, energy and environmental concerns mandate open communications. Organizations increasingly need to measure themselves against non-financial indicators which are increasingly earning respect and validity. Social Responsibility reporting is more than just a good business practice, it is a way to demonstrate values at work. Values help to define the role and impact of organizations in the communities and strengthen their reputation as good corporate citizens.

The GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) is a multi-stakeholder governed institution collaborating to provide the global standards in sustainability reporting. Their vision states “disclosure on economic, environmental, and social performance is as commonplace and comparable as financial reporting, and important to organizational success.” When considering climate change, the global economy, and critical need for new sustainable business models, measuring and reporting on carbon emissions is a baseline requirement for an organizations’ transparency.

The need for transparency can be addressed with a sustainable financial solutions which provides the foundation information needed to make important decisions that are in alignment with the organizations’ core mission and corporate responsibility objectives. Visibility across the organization and into the often disparate and isolated pockets of is a requirement to understand the impact of decisions.

With this knowledge, alongside built-in comparative data, understanding of energy usage and carbon emissions, and results of other key performance indicators, organizations can make significant progress in tackling their social responsibility initiatives.