Corporate Sustainability Management

by McElroy, Mark W.; van Engelen, M. L.

• ISBN13: 9781844079117
• ISBN10: 1844079112
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-03
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Businesses around the world are increasingly turning to an exciting new branch of management known as corporate sustainability management (CSM), to help them better understand and manage their non-financial performance. Indeed, what we are witnessing is nothing less than the birth of a new management function.The main pillar of CSM is the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), which has been successful as an organizing principle but a failure in practice. This is largely due to the absence of 'sustainability context' in related measurement, management and reporting efforts - when for example the monitoring of a company's use of freshwater resources fails to take into account the size of related supplies. This book is the first to introduce a systematic means of including context in sustainability management and 'doing effective CSM'. After making the case for why context matters, the book explains how to do context-based CSM by providing a stepwise, cyclical blueprint for how to practice CSM in any organization. This includes a template for context-based metrics compatible with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), as well as specific examples of metrics for each of the triple bottom lines.Practical examples of best practice are presented throughout and boxes examine challenging issues such as how can an organization measure performance against context-based standards if such standards do not exist? And if they do exist, where and what are they? Appendices include tools for developing and applying context-based metrics and a 'True Sustainability Index' consisting of 15 context-specific metrics that cut across the triple bottom line in all of its dimensions.This guide is the essential tool for business and organizational leaders in all sectors committed to improving their sustainability reporting, management and performance.