Corporate sustainability reporting

A new report by Futerra, SustainAbility, KPMG and GRI (the Global Reporting Initiative) presents the results of a survey of authors and readers of corporate sustainability reports. 


They key findings of the report are:

• Reporting is becoming more global, with more than 70% of the readers surveyed coming from Brazil (obviously not a random sample!)
• Reporting is being used to improve the internal processes of companies 
• The majority of authors of the reports cited stakeholder engagement as a reason for reporting, while fewer than 20% of readers cited engagement as a reason for reading reports
• Few readers believed companies were fully reporting their sustainability progress, although most believed that companies were reporting what they thought was important.
• Reporting was not being used to compare company performance
• The majority of readers believed that the use of standards improved the quality and transparency of reporting.
• A variety of internal and external measures of success were important for both readers and authors
• Sustainability reports are used for a variety of reasons, such as informing product/service choice, investment decisions and sharing information
• Almost half the readers had shared their views of the report with others
• Sustainability reporting leads to changed behaviour within companies and the people reading the reports with actions related specifically to the company, but also relating to broader sustainability issues

See also an article by one of the authors in the Guardian.


via Dr Saffron O'Neill.

Prosperity without growth

There has been a lot of interest in whether it is possible that our current economic system and its reliance on growth is compatible with the idea of a more sustainable society. Tim Jackson explored this in depth in a 2009 report for the British Sustainable Development Commission and subsequent book.   


Tim Jackson argues that our current societal path that requires economic growth for prosperity is unsustainable. He proposes three main steps that are required to change our
trajectory; 1) macro-economic reforms that change the emphasis away from growth and consumption and increased labour productivity 2) changing social structures to increase social capital, reduce competitive consumerism and reduce inequality and 3) respecting ecological limits.


There is evidence that prosperity requires economic growth to provide stability, basic social services and that prosperity is based on material opulence. Growth is necessary to prevent economic collapse by stabilizing employment in response to increased productivity, which would otherwise result in reduced employment; “growth may be unsustainable, but ‘de-growth’ appears to be unsustainable”. Jackson argues that “absolute decoupling” of the economy from resource consumption is required to have an ecologically sustainable system, and e.g. stabilizing the climate will require a substantial decoupling of growth and carbon intensity. He argues that this is not likely to occur within our current economic framework. Growth is also being driven by the “production and consumption” of novel material goods, and that stability of the economic system requires growth in consumption. This pattern also leads to anxiety and reduced social wellbeing as a result of the social comparisons required in forming status and identity.


Jackson argues that prosperity is possible without economic growth. He proposes a macro-economic model that does not use GDP as its main metric, and where increasing labour productivity is not required and there is an increasing emphasis on non-material services. Jackson himself admits that this is a speculative approach and that no economies currently operate this way. Jackson also argues that social changes away from consumerism are required to deliver prosperity without growth. While prosperity requires “material sustenance”, there are important social and psychological dimension of prosperity that are currently undervalued. Goals that embed people with social networks of family and community at the expense of goals related to social status may lead to increased happiness and sustainability. This can be achieved by removing incentives for status competition, and establishing structures that provide social capabilities.

International conference on sustainable consumption announced

Sustainable Consumption – Towards Action and Impact

November 6th - 8th 2011

Hamburg, Germany
 

The scientists of the inter- and transdisciplinary research programme «From Knowledge to Action – New Paths towards Sustainable Consumption», funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education since 2008, invite the international and interdisciplinary scientific community to present and discuss new research findings on sustainable consumption. The conference will take place in Hamburg, European Green Capital 2011.

In modern societies, private consumption is a multifaceted and ambivalent phenomenon: It is a ubiquitous social practice and economic driving force, yet at the same time its consequences conflict with important social and environmental sustainability goals. Finding paths towards "sustainable consumption" has therefore become a major political issue. But, despite considerable knowledge about the unsustainability of current consumption patterns and in spite of numerous initiatives in the field of consumer information, a general trend towards sustainable consumption is not recognisable.

Focussing on consumer behaviour, its social and cultural embeddedness, and its interdependencies with economic, physical and political frameworks, the international conference will provide a platform for an in-depth interdisciplinary debate on questions such as:

• What are the key psychological, socio-cultural, economic and physical factors that influence consumer behaviour? Which conditions facilitate or inhibit sustainable consumption?
• What are the most promising ways to promote the transformation of consumption patterns towards sustainability? Which designs and mixes of policy instruments are effective? How can consumer initiatives, public policy, and business strategies be coordinated to enhance sustainable consumption?
• What are the impacts of different consumption patterns on sustainability and how can they be assessed?
• What theoretical and methodological research approaches are adequate to produce robust knowledge on sustainable consumption?

The call for papers will be issued in late February 2011.

Reducing inequality will help make our society more sustainable

A recent report and article in the British Medical Journal by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett highlight the relationship between sustainability and income inequality. They find that happiness and life expectancy are no longer related to wealth. The graphs below from the report show that we have well and truly passed a point of diminishing returns where large increases in wealth have relatively little effect on life expectancy or happiness.
 

However, relative incomes within a society are strongly related to health and wellbeing outcomes (see more graphs from the report below - there are many more examples in the report). They argue that this is related to status differentials rather than material benefits. 

Greater inequality leads to competitive consumerism, as people compete for material displays of status, which in turn leads to much higher greenhouse gas emissions (see graph from the report below).

They conclude that achieving a more equal, sustainable society will require "people's willingness to act for the common good" rather than "private greed, short termism and sectional interests" (p45). We need to focus more on developing social capital; and less on economic growth. 

Can status-seeking drive sustainable behaviours?

A recent study by Griskivicius et al. published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has linked peoples' preference for green consumer products to status seeking behaviour. Their experiments showed that people were more likely to choose less luxurious green products after reading a short story that activated their status motive. This effect increased when the choice was made in public rather than in private, and when the green products were more expensive than the non-green products. They explain their findings using evolutionary psychology - costly signalling theory, which suggests that conspicuous conservation behaviours show others in a social group that a person a) is pro-social rather pro-self, and b) that they have the spare capacity to sacrifice resources (time, money, etc) to choose the less personally-beneficial product.

These findings have implications for corporations who are marketing green products - although the idea of increasing prices to make green products more attractive may have undesirable outcomes from an equity point of view! These findings are also interesting when imagining the role of private enterprise in a sustainable society - it may be false to assume that status-seeking behaviours inevitably lead to poor environmental outcomes.

Google N-gram Viewer - tracking social change

A recent article in Science discusses the use of the data encapsulated in Google Books to analyse social trends by looking at the frequency of words or phrases over time. Google has made this data available, and perhaps more usefully, developed a tool (Ngram Viewer) that allows exploration of the data online. So for example, we can see below that the frequency of the phrase "corporate social responsibility" has been trending upwards since the 1960s, while the use of "environmental sustainability" exploded after 1985.

UPDATE: An interesting critical view on the data set used (Google Books) from the humanities at Stanford University's ARCADE 

Are we reaching peak travel in developed countries?

A recent study by Stanford University researchers published in Transport Reviews suggests that per capita travel (motorized travel by car, public bus & train and domestic plane) has reached a plateau in developed countries. They conclude that total per-capita CO2 emissions from travel in developed countries could decline as the carbon intensity of transport continues to decline.

via Lavatus Prodeo