Sustainability Reporting 3.0-Blueprint
The working group has released its final report Reporting Blueprint in one systematic approach to address sustainability reporting.
This four-pronged Blueprint design stems from the recognition that this quartet of areas is distinct yet interconnected and interrelated elements of the overall disclosure regime, thus each element warrants in-depth focus in its own right, following a standardized, systemic approach, before synthesizing the resulting findings into a single report.
Reporting 3.0 does not seek to create yet another reporting or accounting standard, data analytics product or new business model canvas. It aims to boost cross-fertilization of these four as-yet distinct markets through crowd-sourced and well-curated collaboration.
The Blueprint ecosystem addresses four major areas that represent a baseline of the minimum necessary ambition to achieve a sustainable economy (much less a thriving society). These four areas attract the following audiences:
Reporting: Reporting standards setters, reporters, governments (including statistics offices), NGOs, academics, and financial markets players (including investors as well as credit and sustainability rating agencies);
Accounting: Accounting standard setters, accountants, CFOs, controllers; academics in accounting and controlling;
Data: reporting standard setters, companies, CIOs, investors, software and analytics firms, data science experts, academics;
New Business Models: Circular, sharing and collaborative economy entrepreneurs, business model designers, investors, NGOs, new business model initiatives, corporate intrapreneurs, funders, venture capitalists, academics.
It provides linkages to economic system thinking and integral design thinking in the context of corporate reporting and corporate leadership.
The blue print draws on Herman Daly and Limits to Growth Co-Author and Sustainability Institute Founder Donella Meadows to advance a general specification based on three primary dimensions necessary for building out a data infrastructure that fulfills the potential of triggering transformative systems change.
Integration of the multiple capitals (natural, human, social, built, and financial) to optimize positive synergies (and mute / eradicate negative interaction) between and amongst them, to better support the creation of financial, societal (shared), and system value (to employ a recently coined term.) In Daly’s and Meadows’ terms, this integration links the “ultimate means” of natural capital through the intermediate means and ends of human, social, built, and financial capital, all the way through the “ultimate ends” of well-being.
Contextualization of organization-level impacts on the multiple capitals within the carrying capacities of those capitals at the systems level, either a virtuous (regenerative) or vicious (degenerative) cycle. Context-Based Sustainability (an implementation mechanism of the Principle of Sustainability Context) calls for identifying thresholds separating sustainability from unsustainability, as well as assessing allocations of fair-share contributions to maintaining the overall sufficiency of vital capital resources and cycles.
Activation of responses when the sustainability of any capitals – and hence the potential for biota well-being and human fulfillment – is placed at significant risk. Data without engagement falls short of its potential; “activated” data fulfills its potential of driving the change signaled by integrated, contextualized data. The key to activation is evidence-based advocacy by context-driven stakeholders.9 And activated data also catalyzes “acceleration” to scale up change to trigger tipping points of systems change. Indeed, properly contextualized data embeds a gap analysis to signal the magnitude of unsustainability and hence the pace and scale of reform needed to achieve sustainability.
Read the full blueprint here:
http://reporting3.org/reporting-blueprint/#overview
