Measuring Sustainability White Paper

I ran across an excellent white paper from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, on the issue of how to measure sustainability. This is a very worthwhile read. Here is a clip from the paper's introduction:

"The objective of our white paper is to review the current landscape of sustainable metrics. We started with a cursory review of as many measures of sustainability as we could find. Although we found organizations attempting to measure sustainability, we discovered that very few actually translated their efforts into a standard metric. Many organizations offered to evaluate sustainability, but did not disclose their methodology. Other organizations provided certifications in specific areas of sustainability, but did not provide a measure that could be compared to other companies. Still others focused on a particular area of sustainability, such as the environment, labor or supply chain management, but remained very limited in scope. Further, we found that many of the indices were not independent and did not provide an objective measure of sustainability. We narrowed the field to fourteen indices and metrics to explore in more depth."

Download the paper here.