Green Metrics

Strangely enough, although measurement is seen as a ‘must do’ in business, be it measurement of financial parameters such as sales & costs, or of operational parameters such as units produced, there are areas of business that are left mostly unmeasured.

One of these is Corporate Social Investment (CSI), much of this also now being increasingly seen as Green.

Actually, Sustainability the Ultimate Green, the generic end goal, and empowerment and environment are fundamental aspects of this.

However, if metrics exist in these fields they are mostly about cost – and not about impact.

One reason why this may be so is that generally the impact measurement technologies are either too expensive or extremely laborious.

Since Green is the colour of Sustainability we like to think of these metrics as Green Metrics.

And the impact measurement thereof is indeed not only technologically possible but also not necessarily expensive or laborious.

GreenIt! specializes in monitoring impact of interventions and deriving green cost/benefit ratios for these interventions.

It is therefore refreshing to see articles such as the one below wherein Catherine Gunsbury, Director, CSR, General Mills urges the measurement of CSI as necessary and essential.

http://www.csrwire.com/blog/posts/357-general-mills-2011-global-responsibility-report-understanding-impact

Much of the current measurement today is in the harvesting of carbon credits.

That is good – but Sustainability is not only about reducing carbon footprints and trading the reductions in for carbon credits.

And merely being environmentally green is not sufficient for an enterprise or a nation to be sustainable.

Sustainability is a holistic phenomenon and one that requires triple bottom line monitoring.

Environmental Green would then be just one dimension of a three-dimensional model.

The financial sustainability of an enterprise would be one of the other two, and classically it would be known as ‘profit’. 

But ‘high profits’ are not necessarily the key to medium and long-term sustainability.

The remaining dimension is the human one – and here it is about the socio-economic aspects of human resources within enterprises, and of citizens within nations.

CSI in general has much to do with both the environmental and human dimensions.

Unlike Milton Friedman's unfortunate view that "social responsibility is subversive in free societies" it is the other way around: social responsibility is key to ensuring free societies!