Science and sustainability goals: what researchers want businesses to know

If your company is aiming to improve the efficiency of its factory, it might aim for a 3% improvement in productivity each year, with a stretch target of 5%. Hitting those goals would deliver meaningful benefits to the company’s bottom line. If, however, your company is trying to plan for operating in a world where every fundamental resource – from water to energy to talent – is increasingly constrained, standard business goal-setting strategies may not apply.

Instead, sustainability advocates and consultants are increasingly encouraging companies to get a better grasp on the science behind various environmental impacts – and the reality of climate change – and to set goals accordingly. A similar approach is being encouraged for social responsibility goals, although there’s not necessarily the same consensus there on metrics – no global standard exists (yet) for measuring employee happiness or productivity, for example.

The push for more science-based (or what some call “context-based” or “reality-based”) goals in sustainability began in earnest in 2013, as various leading-edge companies, including Unilever, Autodesk, and Intel, began to talk more openly about incorporating science into goal-setting.

In late 2013, Climate Counts released the world’s first science-based ranking of corporate carbon emissions. It calculated not only the amount of CO2 each company emits, but also each company’s potential reductions, placed against a backdrop of the global reductions climate scientists say we need in order to stem the tide of climate change.

“Five years ago, it was the norm to set incremental goals for sustainability in the same way that you would for other aspects of a business – people would look at what they did the previous year and aim to do 3% better,” says consultant and Vanderbilt professor Jeff Gowdy, who partnered with author and consultant Andrew Winston (also a Guardian contributor) to launch the site PivotGoals.com, a database of corporate sustainability goals, last year.

“That makes sense if the boundary for your goals is inside your company. But the problem is that we’re all operating in an external, finite system. There are finite resources and finite places to put waste. That means we need to set goals for companies that take that broader system into account. If we can reduce emissions by 4%, great, but we need 80% by 2050, or more. And if we don’t hit that, we may not have a viable place to do business.”

To that end, when Autodesk created its greenhouse gas reduction goal-setting strategy – Corporate Finance Approach to Climate-Stabilizing Targets (C-FACT) – it decided to open-source the methodology and encourage all companies to use it. The company claims that if all companies were to adopt the free C-FACT approach and meet the targets defined by the methodology, private-sector emissions would be on track to help stabilize the climate by 2050. The method has proven successful for Autodesk as well: In fiscal year 2014, the company achieved a 38.1% reduction in its total emissions compared with its 2009 baseline, exceeding its C-FACT target of a 23.4% reduction.

‘Look at things from a planetary level’

Using science as a basis for sustainability targets is fundamentally about risk management, although it comes with potential reputational benefits as well. “You have to look beyond your company, and even your industry, and look at things from the planetary level, especially for large companies in global industries,” Gowdy says. “If you’re pulling from multiple continents, what happens if the worst-case scenario plays out and there’s a five-to-ten foot sea rise in Bangladesh, and 80% of your shirts are made there? It’s about risk management, reputation management, and scenario planning.”

Intel’s climate policy offers a current-day example. Along with the rest of the tech industry, it worked to reduce its emission of fluorinated gases­ – greenhouse gases that stick around in the atmosphere forever – as much as possible over the past several years, voluntarily complying with the US Environmental Protection Act’s target to reduce emissions of fluorinated gases by 10% by 2012. (The industry reached that target well ahead of the deadline).

“What has driven us is a fear that people will ban the use of fluorinated gases,” Stephen Harper, global director of en­vironment and energy policy at Intel, explained to Sustainable Brands earlier this year. “We try to substitute lower GWP [global-warming potential] gases for higher GWP gases, and to be more effi­cient in recycling and reuse, and where it is needed, develop destruction technologies that turn those gases into other things that are less harmful.”

As the world’s governments and markets inch closer to putting a price on environmental impact and a value on ecosystem services, companies with a better understanding of ecosystem services ­– the natural benefits, ranging from clean water to a healthy population, that our ecosystem provides – and how they both impact and rely upon those services, could be better positioned to operate in a world in which those services are less available and more expensive.

“I think we could expand the understanding of some companies of what ecosystem services are supplied and how they might want to think about them in the future,” says Ann Kinzig, chief research strategist for the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. “We could help them better understand the ecosystem services they rely on and the challenges and benefits to better management of those services.”

Gaps in the science: what we don’t know

But like all science-based goal setting, tying one’s sustainability strategy to a broad understanding of ecosystem services is complicated. Models exist now that can predict how changes in land use or land cover (trees versus forest meadows, for example) will affect the delivery of ecosystem services, but Kinzig says there’s a gap in the knowledge of how to then reach the ideal scenario laid out in the model.

“We can’t yet say what policies would cause you to get forest here and grassland there,” she explains. “If it’s public land, it’s a bit more straightforward. But if it’s a bunch of private landholders, predicting what they’re likely to do under particular incentive or regulatory schemes is harder. We need to be able to say: ‘If you did a payment-for-ecosystem-services scheme here, this group of people would likely achieve a 70% improvement, these would probably cheat, and these others might exceed expectations.’ We don’t have that capacity yet.”

Then there are the complexities of balancing ecosystem services. What is most important to a company might not be crucial to the public good, and focusing on any one ecosystem service often comes with tradeoffs in other areas. The global emphasis on CO2 and climate change, for example, has sometimes led to environmental tradeoffs in other areas, like water.

“We have to look at what other ecosystem services we might be gaining or losing by addressing one aspect,” Kinzig explains. “By reforesting watersheds in the name of carbon sequestration, for example, we have often reduced water supply.”

Balancing those tradeoffs is not the job of companies, nor should it be, Kinzig is quick to point out. But understanding how those shifts in ecosystem services could affect one’s employees or business down the road could be quite beneficial to companies.

“Let’s say you have lots of infrastructure on the coast – you might want to learn more about storm surge damage and how coral reefs or mangroves can help protect against it,” Kinzig says. “If you’re in a fire-prone region, it may be worthwhile to work with your community on fire regulation. You don’t have to be directly dependent on natural resources, like a timber or water company, to care about ecosystem services.”

What’s good for the CEO is good for the scientist

The business world’s embrace of science-based sustainability goals could ultimately be good for science, too. As more companies like Intel and Autodesk voluntarily embed the findings of climate scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change into their strategic operations, it becomes more and more difficult for others to dismiss climate science, the human contributions to climate change, or the impacts of climate change on business.

To that end, non-governmental organizations are encouraging companies to be clearer about the science behind their sustainability targets, as well, and stronger in their endorsements of that science. “A clear message from [the NGOs we work with] is for companies to have a climate policy based upon the science, to strongly support the validity of the science, given that there continues to be a lot of misinformation out there,” Harper said.

• This article was amended 2 September. An earlier version misquoted Vanderbilt University professor Jeff Gowdy as saying we need to reduce emissions 8% or more by 2050. In fact, he said emissions must be reduced by 80% or more by then.
  

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Amy Westervelt is an Oakland, California-based freelance reporter who covers the environment, business and health.

The Science Behind Sustainability Solutions blog is funded by theArizona State University Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled advertisement feature. Find out more here.