Abstract

Today, there are numerous inconsistencies in how enterprises assess, interpret, and report sustainability on their products, services and organizational practices. Both financial and environmental sustainability are critical to any organization. Although more challenging to quantify, social indicators are crucial for accurate sustainability reporting. Aligning corporate activities to achieve short and long-term sustainability is difficult as the three sustainability pillars (financial, environmental and social) are currently assessed independently from each other using different expertise, tools, standards, and multiple verification bodies. The lack of universally accepted sustainability measurement and reporting approaches create challenges to developing reliable standards, robust data management solutions, and reliable decision-making processes. In this manuscript, we summarize a new open framework designed to address identified deficiencies in sustainability reporting, which often result in poor decision-making, and prompt greenwashing criticisms. We show that Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) approaches and rationale that are currently used in environmental impact assessment can be expanded to include financial and social indicators. A roadmap is provided to address shortcomings, controversies and challenges widely encountered when using ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) and SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) sustainability frameworks. A new transparent bottom-up sustainability reporting approach is presented which reinforces “buy-in” and increases workforce engagement by linking operational activities with sustainability performance. Furthermore, our proposed approach can support increased stakeholders and shareholders engagement and enhance overall understanding of required sustainability-related trade-offs. Overall, the proposed framework can enable more informed and timely decision-making to improve overall organizational performance, public perception and internal/external collaboration. The integration of advanced digital tools in the proposed framework can improve accuracy, efficiency, agility and accelerate decision-making.