Mainstream CSM: Where's the Denominator?
While Corporate Sustainability Management (CSM) is clearly making inroads in businesses around the world, most of its practical implementations thus far are seriously flawed. Let us examine this claim further in the context of environmental sustainability management, alone.
As explained by the Global Footprint Network, "Sustainability is a simple idea. It is based on the recognition that when resources are consumed faster than they are produced or renewed, the resource is depleted and eventually used up. In a sustainable world, society's demand on nature is in balance with nature's capacity to meet that demand."
Sustainability, then, always entails a quotient: the numerical result of dividing a rate of resource use (the numerator) by the rate of associated resource production or renewal (the denominator). Hence, a given rate of resource use that exceeds the corresponding rate at which resources are produced or renewed is unsustainable; usage rates that equal or fall below such production or renewal rates are, conversely, sustainable.
Now consider most mainstream CSM measurement and reporting tools currently in use: the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), for example. Tools like GRI focus almost entirely on the numerator (patterns of resource use), and rarely, if ever, on the denominator (rates of resource production or renewal). How, then, can they be of any real use to us in our attempts to manage the sustainability of business operations, much less measure them? The denominator and, therefore, the quotient are both missing!
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