From Open Sustainability
The Key Drivers for the open-sustainability approach are shown below, with an initial focus on the Sustainability Governance
- Sustainability Governance is needed because issues related to poor quality, inefficient systems and incorrect process often lead to issues such as waste and pollution and constrain development.
- Sustainability Governance can help provide guidelines, controls and frameworks for organizations to assist them on the path to better sustainability.
- Governance is also important to encourage and open and transparent approach. As sustainability is such a broad and complex topic and has varying definitions, it is important to have common definitions as best as possible.
- It is needed to keep companies, solution providers and solution implementers “honest” in an area that will receive a tremendous amount of capital investment and political attention. It's a complex so its easy to provide misleading results.
- It is critical to understand the impacts of decisions and how they impact other areas of Sustainability (e.g. how a program that helps reduce a retailer’s carbon footprint by stopping imports from Africa impacts other areas). The goal should be to capture and provide objective information for decisions.
- As the transformation organizations must go through is so significant, companies will benefit from sharing lessons learned. This isn’t necessarily “trade secrets” but an open and transparent forum for them to share information.
- Companies need to think of Sustainability as a competency, something that needs to be integrated into the way the run their business, deliver projects and measure success.
Fundamentally Sustainability Governance is about making sure that the architectures, policies and technology solutions that have been defined are effectively and efficiently implemented. While its focus may be for a specific area, it must be inclusive with a comprehensive approach to Sustainable Development.
