April 10, 2006—There are plenty of ways to measure corporate social and environmental performance—greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions, or percentage of women and people of color in the workforce and on the board of directors, for example. What is lacking, however, is a means to assess the actual social and environmental impacts of corporate action — in other words, the degree to which corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives actually lead to true sustainability.
Last week, the Vermont-based Center for Sustainable Innovation redressed this deficiency by launching a new corporate sustainability measurement and reporting method called the Social Footprint.
“The Social Footprint is the first non-financial reporting method capable of mathematically calculating the true bottom-line impact of an organization on society,” says Mark McElroy, executive director and chief sustainability officer of CSI. an organization.”
The basic concept behind the Social Footprint, developed in collaboration with the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, is elegant in its simplicity: it hinges on comparisons, expressed quantitatively in fractions, or quotients. For example, if a certain geographical region produces 10 million gallons of freshwater yearly (denominator) and humans in the region use 15 million gallons per year (numerator), then the quotient is 15/10, or 1.5.
Ecological sustainability requires the wise conservation of scarce resources for future use, so this example clearly exposes a gap between available resources and their use, illustrating how a quotient over 1.0 is unsustainable. The equation turns on its head when assessing social sustainability.
Jumping from simple illustrations to a real-world corporate example, compare freshwater consumption data published by DuPont for 2001 to 2003 as the numerator to freshwater availability data published by the Pacific Institute for the same period as the denominator. The resulting ecological quotients are 1.37 for 2001, 1.17 for 2002, and 1.13 for 2003.
“The quotients showed that DuPont’s use of freshwater was unsustainable, although improving year over year,” McElroy points out, since ecological sustainability requires quotients under 1.0.
Interestingly, human input factors integrally into the Social Footprint’s calculations. To minimize abstraction and maximize human relevance (and perhaps to maintain metaphorical consistency), the Social Footprint’s yardstick is “people feet” (PF), which compare the number of people involved to the social and environmental impacts they create.
