Download 1-15 Report Card
We all make judgments. We are always comparing, ranking, and creating league tables. And we do so according to certain indexes, criteria, or indicators. Famously, there is the urban ecological footprint and its younger sibling, the water footprint. Thus are the green-ness and sustainability of cities judged and ranked (Siemens; Home Depot). Veolia Environnement has a Water Impact Index (WIIX). Equally famously, there is the Triple Bottom Line. Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) uses such criteria to identify leaders amongst business entities in the sustainability of their (environmental) performance. The website Global 100 publishes a league table of the 100 “Most Sustainable Corporations in the World”. The laggards, we presume, are conspicuous by their absence from such citations.
This “1-15 Report Card” is organized according to the Triple Bottom Line (Chapter 5, Sustainability Concepts Paper): 1 for the over-arching notion of Sustainability; 15 for the facets thereof, circling around from the local and personal (T1) to the big and the global (T14), and back — together with a Topmost Line (T0) (or TmL). The Card’s purpose is to draw attention to the “best-in-class” performers. To do so is to have answered this question:
Which entities — from all walks of life (private-sector business, public-sector agency, civil-society actor, and so on) — are best attending to the “local and personal”, or the “big and the global”, or to the intents of any of the other thirteen facets of Sustainability, in practice?
We judge that the performance of the entities and enterprises cited in the Report Card, for the ways in which they have acted, is exemplary and to be lauded. For the time-being, these exemplars are drawn predominantly from the Water Sector. They are not ranked one to another. Nor is it to be expected that any single enterprise should be the best in all classes. Over time, we plan to add further exemplars to each category of Best in Class.
Download 1-15 Report Card
Contributed by M. B. Beck
Responses to “The “1-15” Sustainability Report Card”