[To make real impacts transparent, to identify emerging behaviors and possible breakpoints, we must keep track of how things evolve and improve. We must develop new methods of assessment and reporting, and new monitoring systems so that businesses, investors, consumers, citizens, regulators and other stakeholders can make informed decisions. We must create new metrics that measure each part's demand on and contribution to the whole now and in the future, and not just local immediately visible effects. We must find ways to measure the health and growth of the commons, and make the processes and results visible and understandable, and part of conversations.
Trends & Existing Initiatives
Basic research is being done, and large changes in starting assumptions for it are readily apparent today, so how these new directons in sustainabilty science progress may be heavily dependent on the success of the commons movement in demanding the work be done. ++
Problem for the institutions that relied on the old sustainabilty metrics, such as the traditional systainable and ethical investment communities. ++
Comprehensive sustainabilty reporting and institutional systainabilty "dashboards" for informing investors, the public and policy makers, today, and tomorrow. ++]
References:
- <<The various targets and reporting methods>>
Dynamics at work: <<Review Jessie>>
- It takes new methods and new metrics to make the real impacts of businesses transparent so business, investors, consumers and regulators can all make intelligent choices. New science has developed that makes true physical measures of the impacts of the complex supply and service chains of business that would permit standard measures of business economic impact on our future, for example, so that a financial future balance sheet could be compared with normal annual financial balance sheets of business. The ability to measure the impacts on the future of the business can also indicate the profitability to the whole of different kinds of investment, creating a new kind of financial commons guided by transparent policies for whole system profitability.
- This work is in the area of Comprehensive Sustainability Reporting (CSR). Much work remains, but accurate comprehensive physical measures will prove a better way to learn about what will make our responses profitable for the future of businesses, investors, consumers."
Who?: Local and regional communities and stakeholders -the people, business community, Insurance sector, Finance sector, Investors, legislators & regulators, consultants, economists, reporting & standards organizations
Action:
- Promote transparency and reporting for monitoring and evaluation systems.
- Create metrics to measure impacts and outcomes, that measure each part's demand on and contribution to the whole now and on our future, and not just local immediately visible effects, as part of Comprehensive Sustainability Reporting (CSR), and compliance to SDGs, targets and indicators
- Provide open access to knowledge, data, and information to allow comparative studies and the correction of misconceptions.
- Promote a general knowledge commons, and creative commons, allowing all to see inside the silos of others so their different views of common subjects, their values and ideas, can be understood and connected.
- Share methods for recognizing irreversible processes and anticipating their tipping points of transformation as well as recognizing seeds of change and anticipation of limits of change.
- Set up processes to ensure that what follows is right and continues to be right, exploring means of confirmation, and a meta-process of reflection and evaluation of measures and methodologies. Enable trial and error and the possibilities to readjust.
- Respond to the abuse of misleading and selective metrics and evaluation systems, defining subjects with only selective variables, and generally assure the fidelity of information to its subjects and their changes.
- Apply rules of fiduciary duty to the speach of corporations and lobbyists, to be liable for being misleading about the true interests of their investors, customers, employees and other stakeholders, as having natural concerns for their own and their society's wellbeing. See Jay Youngdahl's expansion of fiduciary law at Harvard.