A new report offers a methodology for calculating your company's social footprint on climate change.
Your company's what?
Most of the conversation about business and climate change in recent years has to do with which companies are "doing their part" to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But what, exactly, is "their part"? How can you tell whether a company's greenhouse gas emissions reductions are sufficient to reverse global warming and stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations in the earth's atmosphere at an acceptable level?
The Vermont-based Center for Sustainable Innovation has just published an intriguing document that extends its "social footprint" methodology into the climate arena. It yields "quantitative measures of the social sustainability of behaviors -- collective organizational behaviors, in particular," says the group.
If you thought measuring your company's ecological impacts on the climate was tough, you ain't seen nothing yet.
First, some background. The social footprint, says CSI, is "a measurement and reporting method that quantifies the social impact of an organization on people." Unlike the ecological footprint, which is a method for measuring and reporting the impact of societies and organizations on natural resources (a.k.a. "natural capital"), the social footprint deals with societies' and organizations' impacts on what CSI calls "anthro capital," a term that encompasses both human capital and social capital. Unlike natural capital, which is limited and which only nature can create, anthro capital is produced by people and can increase. The goal of measuring social footprints, says CSI, is "to assess the sustainability of organizational operations in terms of their impacts on strategies for achieving climate change mitigation."
Translation: the social footprint looks beyond whether a company's efforts to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions are merely worthy or exemplary, but whether they are sufficient to actually solve the problem.
CSI performed a climate social footprint analysis on six organizations: BP, BT, Johnson & Johnson, Shell, United Technologies, and "an anonymous university." To do so, it compared the organizations' greenhouse gas emissions to "WRE350" targets, then divided this by the number of employees ("people feet") to arrive at a quotient -- a quantitative measure of environmental impact in human terms (the "societal quotient"). WRE350 -- named for its three creators, Wigley, Richels, and Edmonds -- is a scientific model that forecasts carbon emission reductions necessary to reverse carbon dioxide build-up in the earth's atmosphere (currently at about 385 parts per million), and stabilize them at a non-threatening level of 350 parts per mission by 2150.
Only three of the companies studied -- BP, BT, and United Technologies -- were deemed "sustainable," according to the CSI analysis, though BP's score was seen to be declining over the 2001-2005 period covered by the research. Johnson & Johnson, in contrast, while not considered sustainable, was deemed to be improving and "nearing sustainability."
It's early-stage, cutting-edge stuff, to be sure. It asks companies to accept at face value such concepts as "actual annual carbon emissions per capita per people foot" (the latter term being an adjusted headcount metric "to reflect time spent at work vs. elsewhere," says CSI). It goes beyond merely tracking aggregate greenhouse emissions, assessing whether a company's climate strategy and performance can actually help stem a climate crisis over the long term.
All of which may be a stretch for the myriad of companies still grappling with more conventional measures of climate impact, such as how many pounds of carbon they emit for each widget they make, but it seems no less important.
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