The Sustainability Handbook

The Complete Management Guide to Achieving Social, Economic and Environmental Responsibility

William R. Blackburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136552021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Education
• Index: Business

The Sustainability Handbook covers all the challenges, complexities and benefits of sustainability for businesses, governments and other organizations. It provides a blueprint for how organizations can reach or exceed economic, social and environmental excellence. It offers a host of practical approaches and tools including a model sustainability policy for organizations, summaries of sustainability codes and tips on selecting them, an extensive collection of metrics and a wealth of supplementary reference material. This is the essential reference for every organization in pursuit of sustainability.

CHAPTER 1

Addressing the Confusion About Sustainability: The Typical Executive View

“If you cry ‘Forward!’ you must without fail make plain in what direction to go. Don’t you see that if, without doing so, you call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in directions precisely opposite?”¹

—Anton Chekhov

Consider these typical responses you might hear from business executives about sustainability:

“The business of business is business, not sustainability.”

“Sustainability is nice to do if you can afford it, but we are running a lean organization here and don’t have the time or money for such things.”

“Sustainability is about good citizenship and good public relations. We have always tried to be a good corporate citizen. There’s really nothing more we need to do.”

“Sustainability seems to encompass everything under the sun. It’s just more tree-hugger mumbo jumbo.”

“We’re in a U.S. service business. Sustainability is not for us. It’s for those big international manufacturers.”

“What is sustainability?”

For sustainability advocates, this isn’t encouraging. The picture was rosier for them in the 1990s when President William J. Clinton appointed a council to study and publicize sustainability. But in recent years, the U.S. government’s focus on it has subsided as terrorism and war have dominated the agenda.

So is sustainability just a fad?

No. Quite the contrary. There is plenty of evidence the concept is here to stay. In government circles in Australia, Canada, Europe, and several other regions, sustainability has been gaining momentum. Attention to it has also been on the rise among leading businesses, academic institutions, and other sectors in the United States and abroad. More than 70% of large companies surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2002 reported that sustainability was important or very important to them, and nearly 9 of 10 respondents believed there would be more emphasis on it in the near future.² World leaders like United Kingdom (U.K.) Prime Minister Tony Blair and former United Nations (U.N.) Secretary-General Kofi Annan promoted it. Over the past few years, sustainability conferences have been held throughout the world—even in places like Chile, China, Croatia, Iceland, Kenya, Morocco, Palestine, and United Arab Emirates.³ Forty major banks around the world have committed to consider sustainability effects in making major investment decisions.⁴ Wangari Maathai, a crusader for poor women and the environment in her native Kenya, acknowledged the importance of the concept in her acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.⁵ It was included in U.N. resolutions on the recovery and rebuilding of Iraq.⁶ The European Commission issued a “green paper” on it in 2001 and chartered an organization to determine how to further it.⁷ In recent years there has been a blizzard of discussion and debate among business, activists, and academics about it. Books, articles, and conferences abound on the topic. In 2006, there were over 60 million entries on sustainable development on the Internet, up eightfold from 2003.

History of Sustainability

But even with all this attention to sustainability, much confusion remains about it in business circles. The concept—really a blend of concepts—first emerged in Stockholm during the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment. There, industrialized and developing nations debated which was more important: environmental protection or economic development.⁸ This was a time when the environmental movement was bursting on the scene, 10 years after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring,⁹ a powerful book describing the dangers of pesticides to wildlife and humans. The same year of the Stockholm meeting, the United States passed five major pieces of environmental legislation. Only a year later, India would witness the Chipko citizen uprising against deforestation. Within this setting, the debates at Stockholm gave birth to the notion that both environmental protection and economic development were inextricably linked. That idea was refined through extensive discussions in U.N. circles over the many years that followed.

In the late 1970s and the decade thereafter, other momentous events sparked public outcries about the need for environmental responsibility. These outcries were coupled with growing demands for open, transparent communication from industry and government about environmental risks. This was the time of the Love Canal toxic waste debacle in New York and the deadly Bhopal release in India. It was also the period of public anger over the massive Alaskan oil spill from the Exxon Valdez oil tanker and the disastrous radiation release at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union. In the United States, these headline events inspired a number of laws, including one requiring industry to file annual public reports on their inventories and releases of toxic materials—data that proved shocking to many communities.

But environmental issues were not the only concern. The Apartheid racial segregation policies of South Africa were coming under attack from Rev. Dr. Leon Sullivan, a Philadelphia clergyman and civil rights leader, and from other religious and student activists as well. The movement gained momentum in 1976 when South African police fired on student demonstrators at Soweto. A burgeoning number of universities, pension funds, and local governments in Europe and the United States began dropping their investments in companies that refused to recognize human rights and equal opportunity in their South African operations. The seeds of Apartheid’s demise were being sown, and “socially responsible investing” was finding new meaning. Meanwhile, a new disease, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), was beginning its devastating rampage.

These issues were the backdrop for the Brundtland Commission, a group appointed by the United Nations to propose strategies for improving human well-being without threatening the environment. In 1987, the commission published its report containing the definition of sustainable development most widely used today: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”¹⁰ Five years later, the concept was fleshed out in 27 principles in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development,¹¹ the work product of the Rio Earth Summit—the U.N Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. The declaration recited the economic and environmental concerns that had been the main focus of sustainability, but added social topics like peace, poverty, and the role of women and indigenous people.¹² In 1997, Briton John Elkington introduced a definitional term drawn from financial accounting: the triple bottom line (TBL). By this he meant that to reach sustainability, one must achieve not only economic “bottom-line” performance but environmental and social performance as well.¹³ When the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) issued its draft Sustainability Reporting Guidelines for organizations in 1999, it, too, assumed sustainability entailed all three TBL elements. The final versions published in 2000 and 2002 continued that assumption.¹⁴

In recent years, other developments have refined the dimensions of sustainable development. High-profile incidents involving sweatshops in Asia have given rise to voluntary inspection and certification programs targeted at operations supplying products to transnational companies. Pressures from activists have led to other certification programs on fair trade, lumber, fishing, and agricultural products. Labor and environmental groups have appeared together in front-page photos of demonstrations against global trade policies. Financial scandals at Enron Corporation, Tyco International, Ltd., and WorldCom have highlighted the importance of good corporate governance. Organic food and hybrid cars are no longer novelties but big business. Product and packaging takeback laws have extended the responsibility of producers across Europe. Climate change is now a threat backed by serious science, and an issue of growing investor concern. Rating groups have exploded on the scene to evaluate company social and environmental performance to satisfy growing legions of socially responsible investors. The GRI, a coalition of investors, activists, business, and other organizations, has helped make sustainability reporting commonplace among major companies. Activist and public interest groups—known as NGOs—have gained considerable voice and power. With their creative use of coalitions and the Internet, their role continues to expand. All of this has been encircled within the concept of sustainability.

Resources and Respect

Indeed, trends and events ascribed to sustainability, and the scores of definitions of it, have reflected a common theme about its meaning. We shall use that theme to craft the meaning of sustainability for purposes of this book. We shall call this meaning the “2Rs,” which stand for:

Resources: the wise use and management of economic and natural resources; and

Respect: respect for people and other living things.

The aim of the 2Rs from an organization’s perspective is long-term well-being, both for society as a whole as well as for itself. A more in-depth explanation and examination of the 2Rs is given in Chapter 2.

Selecting the Term: Sustainability? Corporate Social Responsibility? Something Else?

Sustainability and sustainable development are two terms that cover the 2Rs as it applies to organizations. But there are other terms, too. Corporate social responsibility (CSR), organizational social responsibility (OSR), social responsibility, corporate responsibility, corporate social investment, corporate citizenship, global corporate citizenship, and sustainable growth are sometimes used to mean the same thing. While sustainability, as we have...