Sustainability Measurement, Assessment, and Reporting

Sustainability is a characteristic of dynamic systems that maintain themselves over time rather than a fixed endpoint that can be defined in a short time. Equally, environmental sustainability refers to the long-term maintenance of valued environmental resources in an evolving human context. Different models, formulas, indicators, and principles have been developed and proposed in the literature to guide strategic planning for sustainability measurement, assessment and reporting. The emphasis has mostly been on accounting approaches that focus on the maintenance of capital stocks, the measurement of natural resource depletion, or the determination of whether or not the current rates of resource use can be sustained into the distant future. The emphasis on sustainability assessment, however, should be broader and more policy oriented. This chapter presents contemporary approaches to monitoring, measuring, and reporting sustainability efforts. The application and use of environmental indicators in measuring success toward meeting sustainability goals and objectives are presented, and methods are described for organizations to follow to either develop or adopt benchmarking frameworks as a points of reference for assessing the trends, and to measure their progress toward sustainability. Also discussed are the types, characteristics, and application of the sustainability indicators; benchmarking techniques; and reporting guidelines.