Auditing and communicating business sustainability

This article is based on research undertaken at Imperial College Centre for Environmental Technology (ICCET) in association with the environmental consultancy SustainAbility. The paper is intended to provide some clarity on what the concept of sustainability means for businesses, both conceptually and operationally. Furthermore, it outlines an initial approach that may be used to ‘measure’ business performance against what might be considered to be the basic principles of business sustainability. Based on a review of the various spheres of business operations, the authors build on the four different types of capital of Spangenberg and Bonniot (1997) (ecological, social, economic and organizational), to explore the systemic nature of sustainability. ‘Discrete’, technocratic, environmental audits have their limits and hardly address other portions of business performance such as social, human or economic issues. Auditing techniques, and the norms or indicators against which audits are expected to measure sustainability performance, should incorporate the interlinkages between these various spheres of operations to more closely mirror the systemic nature of sustainability, i.e. an ‘inclusive’ approach is adopted. Nine key principles for sustainable business management have been identified and linked to each other to provide a conceptual framework for progress towards sustainability. The paper then proposes a set of indicators for the assessment of the effectiveness of each principle. The importance of information generation, and related indicator sets, is underlined, so that the dynamic transmission of values can occur and adapt to the changing environment.