The transition to a sustainable economy has begun and, like the process of industrialization itself, we are looking at a transformation process that will last for decades. To speed this transition, we need to create an environment where all organizations integrate sustainability principles into routine management decision-making. To accomplish that, we need to do a better job of measuring the sustainability of our organizations, cities and nations. A clear sign of the growing importance of sustainability management is the impressive number of efforts to develop and utilize sustainability metrics to enable organizations to effectively measure their sustainability. However, there are a variety of different methods for measuring sustainability and for reporting those efforts, and it seems that each company and organization (including cities and some countries) has a different method.

While the development of these indicators is critical and must be continued, it is time to begin the process of settling on organizational sustainability indicators that everyone can use and understand. We need a generally accepted set of definitions and indicators for measuring sustainability. These should be mandated for companies to disclose and, to ensure that these required metrics are reliable, we need independent auditors for verification.

We believe it will be necessary to identify a parsimonious set of metrics for managers to incorporate into strategic planning and tactical management of economic and environmental goals. This will better enable organizations to utilize sustainability to drive performance and competitiveness, rather than reacting to environmental risks, stakeholder requests, or regulatory requirements. Deciding what indicators to track and to report is a critical step in engaging organizations in transitioning to a sustainable economy. A focus on core, critical and material sustainability metrics, measured by performance rather than disclosure, can drive the transition to adopting concepts of sustainability into traditional organizational management structures and processes.

The Earth Institute Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management has begun a theoretically grounded process of reviewing the variety of environmental sustainability indicators tentatively proposed by governments, corporations and other organizations with the objective of arriving at a specific, robust and valid set of measures which eliminate redundancy and facilitate decision-making when trade-offs across multiple objectives are encountered.  

This paper will present the landscape of sustainability metrics at the corporate and public-sector levels, and will analyze the many frameworks, standards and indices used by organizations to measure, assess, compare, and report on sustainability. We will present a framework and methodology for analyzing the extensive universe of standards and frameworks for commonalities to see whether a core set of critical, broadly accepted indicators is emerging. We then explore the challenges with these frameworks and sustainability reporting at the corporate-level, and present an argument for the necessity of a set of generally accepted sustainability metrics. We also examine the role of the public sector in sustainability measurement and metrics, first examining mandated sustainability reporting as it exists in other countries, comparing that to the state of sustainability reporting in the U.S.