The World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD) published a report on Sustainable Consumption, which examines the relationship between business activities, sustainable consumption, and environmental and social challenges.
The report says current global consumption patterns are unsustainable. “It is becoming apparent that efficiency gains and technological advances alone will not be sufficient to bring global consumption to a sustainable level; changes will also be required to consumer lifestyles, including the ways in which consumers choose and use products and services.”
Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) has also released a report: Measuring the Corporate Impact on Ecosystems: A Comprehensive Review of New Tools. The BSR report argues that: “Companies may face accountability, not only for pollution prevention, but also for impacts (positive or negative) to ecological structure and function in the areas where they operate or source. Such an evolving mandate could either be advanced via regulation or, more opaquely, become expected practice by investors, insurers, activists, employees or neighboring communities. Such an expanded focus would translate into a company needing to understand its dependencies and impacts (both positive and negative) on the flow of ecosystem services.”
While the report omits the Sustainable Sites Initiative, it outlines the value of ‘multi-ecosystem service assessment tools,’ such as InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs), MIMES (Multi-scale Integrated Models of Ecosystem Services), and the NVI (Natural Value Initiative).
BSR has 250 member companies, and WBCSD is a CEO-led global association of 200 firms.
Read Sustainable Consumption: Facts and Trends from a Business Perspective and Measuring Corporate Impact on Ecosystems: A Comprehensive Review of New Tools
