results that, hopefully, lead to a product, service, or experience with better performance of some kind.
“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” —Henry David Thoreau in a letter to Harrison Blake (20 May 1860); published in Familiar Letters (1865)
CHAPTER 2
How Is Sustainability Measured?
You Get What You Measure
This is the reality of most of the world—and especially the business world. Measures are seductive. Attaching a score or value to something often makes it seem more legitimate, accurate, and valid. Even if the measurement or scoring system is hopelessly flawed or the things being measured are fundamentally so qualitative that they resist quantitative measurement—scores, ratings, and numbers make us more comfortable, and often influence decisions more than any other issue. If there is a number, for example, we can track its rise or fall and compare it to similar numbers for related solutions.
Unfortunately, this means that things that can’t be measured easily because they’re so abstract or too big to measure (like happiness or environmental impact) often get ignored in decision making. At first, we may try to keep in mind their value alongside more quantitative measures, but after a while we forget to include them, and they disappear from not only our consciousness, but also our development criteria and management procedures. Throughout history, many of the benefits that design can bring have been difficult to measure, especially the ones that are projected into the future. This inability to project has made it difficult for designers to convince all manner of people, from managers to business leaders, to investors, to educators, and even to government officials the value that specific solutions and the design process itself can add.
This, too, is what has happened with social and environmental issues in business. There have been recent attempts to measure the financial value of social and environmental issues, and these are important steps. For example, if you can show the financial savings in energy efficiency for a skyscraper, especially as compared to the nominal differences in construction costs, you’ve got a great justification for building a more “green” building. Likewise, if you can show that your publicity solution will likely cause one million people to replace two standard incandescent light bulbs with LED bulbs a year, saving electricity in a municipal power system and preventing tons of carbon and sulfur from being released into the atmosphere, then you’ve got a great case for social venture investment.
Social Measures
But how does one value social issues? How do you measure the financial benefit of saving a life or not causing pain to an animal? And should you? Even in purely financial terms (such as calculating the lifetime earning capacity for a Nigerian child saved from a disease), these approaches ignore the emotional, ethical, and meaning value of saving or improving a life. There have been no measures, to date, capable of tallying the social benefits of most social and environmental issues. In a 1997 article in Nature magazine, 13 experts from a variety of institutes and organizations calculated the total value of ecosystem services to be between $16 and $54 trillion. The average, which is on the conservative side, is $33T. This represents the value that nature provides to us (individuals, businesses, governments, and organizations alike).
In a 1997 article in Nature magazine, 13 experts from a variety of institutes and organizations calculated the total value of ecosystem services to be between $16 and $54 trillion.
Ecosystem services include the following areas:
Regulation of atmospheric chemical composition.
Regulation of climate (including global to local temperature, precipitation, etc.)
Regulation of climate disturbances (dampening fluctuations in storms, floods, draught, etc.).
Regulation of water for storage and access (both agricultural and industrial uses).
Control of erosion and sediment.
Control of soil (formation and retention).
Regulation of nutrient cycles (storage, cycling, processing, and acquisition).
Treatment of waste (pollution control, detoxification, etc.).
Control of biological systems—except humans (regulation of populations).
Provision of habitats for migrating species.
Production of food.
Supply of raw materials (organic and inorganic).
Supply of genetic resources.
Recreational uses (including sports and tourism).
Cultural uses (aesthetic, artistic, educational, spiritual, scientific, etc.).
Those numbers measuring the financial impact of environmental issues are already staggeringly persuasive in many cases, but perhaps we shouldn’t try to measure social benefits in such a way.[1]
Just to give you a taste of what I’m talking about, let’s just look at a list of the potential social issues that concern people (see Table 2.1). For sure, few people track all of these issues, but all of them show up on someone’s radar screen, in one SRI (Socially Responsible Investment Fund) screen or another, or become the focus of a protest at some point.
Table 2.1: 2008 Qualifying and Rating Criteria from Highwater Research
| GOOD COMPANY |
| Intention |
| ENVIRONMENTAL |
| Genetic Modification Nuclear Power Fossil Fuels Clearcut Logging Hazardous Waste Industrial Farming Animal Cruelty |
| SOCIAL |
| Human Rights Unethical Conduct Gambling Tobacco Weapons Fast Food Alcohol Sexually Explicit Material Explicit Violence |
| LEADERSHIP |
|
Financial
|
