Sustainability Measures
- joshlyns
- Jul 25, 2018
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 7, 2018
Today there is little consensus about which functional area in an organization should lead to sustainability initiatives.
What does sustainability mean?
Sustainability is a flexible concept open to a great deal of projection and lack of clarity; the history and origin of sustainability derives from mix concepts evolving throughout the years, defining sustainability as: the underlying pillars to social and ecological dynamics, the social justice to underdevelopment economies, the social inequalities from industrialized sectors, the social justice that remain largely unexplored; and the limits to growth.
How do we achieve sustainability?
Sustainability emerges out of sense, empirical documentation, and environmental crisis (Sze et al., 2018) causing rapid growth of environmental problems mapping in methods into the conditions of life, land, and labor.
The variables an organization should consider and analyze when implementing sustainability efforts(Hollingworth, 2009) consist of the following:
1) Analyzing organization structure, including: mission, objectives, vision, production, operation, and supply; check levels of value aside from profit.
2) Analyzing community resources, including: social and ethno-sphere atmospheres; check to see if mission is align with other sector(s) mission.
3) Analyzing human resources internally and externally: check to see what types of health & wellness resources are available and what
types of programs help
employees reach personal goals.
4) Analyzing the planet and bio-sphere: natural resources, energy usages, and eco-system; check to see types of health injuries and risk factors from the company.
The dilemma is how to get businesses to care about sustainability measures within the organization.
The first strategy is redesigning products to meet environmental standards or social needs with an emphasis on new business opportunities for implementing sustainability efforts (Harvard Business Review, 2016). Supporting this claim is recent efforts from Nike, "the company embedded sustainability into its innovation process and created the $1 billion-plus Flyknit line, which uses a specialized yarn system, requiring minimal labor and generating large profit margins. Flyknit reduces waste by 80% compared with regular cut footwear and has reduced 3.5 million pounds of waste and fully transitioned from yarn to recycled polyester, diverting 182 million bottles from landfills" (Whelan & Fink, 2016).
The second strategy is redesigning the company's business matrix around risk. For example, take the agriculture sector into consideration; business matrix for risks include: sustainability strategies for climate change impact, growing conditions for different season temperatures, solutions to increase in pests & disease, and improvement solutions for decreasing crop yields. In addition, risk matrix include operations and supply chain strategies for unpriced natural assets, groundwater, and clean air because these unpriced natural capital costs cause disruptions in the production processes inducing commodity price fluctuations; examples of unpriced natural assets can be referred to as floods, hurricanes, or natural disasters.
The third strategy is to explore the depth of sustainability in terms of a management context; sustainability can be associated with resilience. Resilience is the ability to prepare for threats, absorb impacts, and recover or adapt to persistent stress as well as disruptive events. Sustainability and resilience share common research methodologies, such as: life-cycle analysis, structural analysis, and socio-economic analysis. The methods of resilience tend to focus on adapting to new conditions, creating innovative uses of traditional knowledge, and improving living conditions; resilience is a response to interruption rooted in preparedness (Linkov et al., 2017).
Did You Know
Investors are paying attention (Global Institutional Investor Survey, 2015) and are using nonfinancial disclosures to make investment decisions: results show 59.1% out of 200 investors view nonfinancial disclosures as essential to investment decisions up from 34.8% in 2014. In addition, around 62.4% of investors focus on the risk of assets that lose value prematurely due to environmental, social, or other external factors and over one-third of respondents report cutting investments in the past year because of this type of risk.
References
Hollingworth, M. (2009). Building 360 Organizational Sustainability. Ivey Business Journal. Retrieved April 20, 2018 from World Wide Web:
Marchese, D., Reynolds E., Bates M., Morgan H., Clark S. & Linkov. (2018).
Resilience and Sustainability: Similarities and Differences in
Environmental Management Applications. Science of The Total
Environment. Volume 613-614, p. 1275-1283. Retrieved on July 30, 2018
from Google Scholar:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969717324282
Sze, J. (2018). Sustainability Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social
Power. New York University Press. Retrieved on July 30, 2018.
Whelan, T. & Fink C. (2016). The Comprehensive Business Care for
Sustainability. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on July 31, 2018
from World Wide Web:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969717324282
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Sustainability Measures is to help businesses acknowledge the basic outliers of planning and incorporating such concepts into current business practice.
"For a solution to be truly sustainable and good it must have a positive return to the environment and society. At the heart of any design problem is a question: Are we trying to make something less bad or we trying to make things better? …It’s not just about solving for the negative; It’s about creating a positive.” – Eric Wicks
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