Balancing Act: A triple bottom line analysis of the Australian economy

The Balancing Act report is divided into four volumes available for download as separate Adobe Acrobat pdf files. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the files. Each volume is a large file and may be slow to download across low bandwidth Internet connections. If you have problems downloading or accessing the files, please request the report on a CD ROM by emailing the Resource Futures Program cse.resfutures@csiro.au at CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems.

The Wider Social Benefits of Education

Business and Industry are recognising that the social outcomes of doing business underpin their social licence to operate. The ISO 26000, to be introduced in 2008, will provide guidance on Social Responsibility (SR) for all types of organisations in both public and private sectors. The Global Reporting Initiative includes numerous social indicators in its reporting framework (GRI, 2006). Business and industry seem to be moving towards taking responsibility for the social effects of doing business, recognising that their organisations are embedded in community. Meanwhile in the field of education there has been a major shift in Australia towards private expenditure in the tertiary sector (OECD, 2006) accompanied by a shift of public subsidies to tertiary students themselves. Implicit in this funding shift is the message that tertiary education is a private rather than public good, belonging to individual students rather than the wider population. This paper explores the literature on the wider social benefits of higher education, most of which seem to be indirect, arising through the increased economic benefits to individuals. It points to the gaps in Australian research in this area.

The Ecological Footprint - Issues and Trends

The ecological footprint was originally conceived as a simple and elegant method for comparing the sustainability of resource use among different populations, and has since considerably enriched the sustainability debate. Since the formulation of the ecological footprint, a number of researchers have mentioned the oversimplification in ecological footprints of the complex task of measuring sustainability of consumption. In particular, aggregated forms of the final ecological footprint make it difficult to understand the specific reasons for the unsustainability of the consumption of a given population, and to formulate appropriate policy responses. In response to the issues highlighted, the Ecological Footprint has undergone significant modification. Comprehensive input-output-based ecological footprints are now calculated in many countries, and applied to populations, companies, cities, regions and nations.

Shared Producer and Consumer Responsibility - Theory and Practice

Over the past decade, an increasing number of authors have been examining producer versus consumer responsibility. Recently, a problem has appeared in drafting the standards for the Ecological Footprint: While the method traditionally assumes a full life-cycle perspective with full consumer responsibility, a large number of producers have started to calculate their own footprints. Adding any producer’s footprint to population footprints that all already cover the full upstream supply chain, leads to double-counting: The sum over footprints of producers and consumers is larger than the total national footprint. The committee in charge of the Footprint standardisation process was faced with the decades-old non-additivity problem, posing the dilemma of how to curtail the supply chains of actors in order to avoid double-counting. This report demonstrates a non-arbitrary method of consistently delineating these supply chains, into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive portions of responsibility to be shared by all actors in an economy.

Carbon neutral - sense and sensibility

Businesses offering to make you or your company carbon neutral are proliferating on the internet. The term carbon neutral is being defined by common usage. There are no standard ways of measuring your carbon emissions and so no standards for becoming carbon neutral. This paper examines eleven websites offering carbon neutrality. It compares online calculators, their results and the costs of offsetting calculated on the strength of those results. It traces two offset projects from the online carbon offset retailer to the actual project on the ground in order to compare the online rhetoric with the time consuming and difficult work of developing community based projects in Third World countries. The paper offers a definition of carbon neutral based on the ways in which the term is being used. It also uncovers a range of issues for further discussion.

A definition of 'carbon footprint'

The term ‘carbon footprint’ has become very popular over the last few years and is now in widespread public use. With climate change high up on the political and corporate agenda, carbon footprint assessments are in strong demand. Despite its ubiquitous public use however, the scientific literature is surprisingly void of clarifications, let alone definitions of the term 'carbon footprint'. This report explores the apparent discrepancy between public and academic use of the term ‘carbon footprint’ and suggests a scientific definition based on commonly accepted accounting principles and modelling approaches. It addresses methodological questions such as system boundaries, completeness, comprehensiveness, units and robustness of the indicator.

Forecasting the Ecological Footprint of Nations - a blueprint for a dynamic approach

This report provides the theoretical base and an example for expanding the static Ecological Footprint accounting method into a dynamic forecasting framework which is forward looking to 2050, incorporating biodiversity amongst other factors, into a causal network of driving forces, and taking into account globalised trade with its complex supply chains. This world-first Dynamic Ecological Footprint connects the original Ecological Footprint method with some modifications that were anchored at different points of the causal network, such as land use and disturbance, species diversity, and pollution. It thus demonstrates an effective and elegant means for unifying a range of methodologies and objectives into on framework while retaining the research question and metric of the original approach.

Systems for Social Sustainability: Global Connectedness and the Tuvalu Test

We discuss the social dimension of the TBL as the social impact of (an organisation) doing business. Acknowledging the interconnectivity of social, environmental, and economic impacts on a local scale we recognise that everything we do together on this planet is connected through time and space in a seamless web of interactions. Moreover through this interdependency of living system and environment our actions are bound by something we refer to as human ethics. This brings us to the idea that the social dimension of TBL, which seeks ethical solutions to local social dilemmas is striving towards something that we call social sustainability and in some way is contributing to an ethical future for living systems. Hence the discussion moves from the social bottom line of an organisation, or workplace, into the notion of social sustainability and society as a whole because all of society is interlinked.

Unravelling the Impacts of Supply Chains

The research question of this report is "How can corporate sustainability performance be quantified and compared in practice, whilst taking into account the responsibility sharing nature of trading and avoiding double-counting of impacts?". The report a) describes the analytical approach to measure the indirect impacts of a comprehensive Triple Bottom Line account of a producing entity, b) presents a quantitative concept of shared responsibility as a solution to assigning responsibility to both producers and consumers, in a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive way, and c) demonstrates practical applications in examples of quantification of indirect impacts, supply chain contributions and shared responsibility.

Assessing the impacts of a loaf of bread

This paper provides detailed information about on-site and supply chain ‘costs’ of producing a loaf of bread, in terms of indicators across the social, economic and environmental bottom lines. Both on-site and supply-chain viewpoints help to tell a story. Both are necessary components of ‘the true cost of a loaf of bread’. But the real decision about what to do with this information ultimately rests with people. What an integrated sustainability analysis of bread can offer are metrics and results, underpinned by a transparent philosophy, that can lay bare the intricacies of an interdependent and infinite supply chain.

Life-cycle energy and greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear energy in Australia

The increased urgency of dealing with the mitigation of looming climate change has sparked renewed interest in the nuclear energy option. There exists a substantial stream of research on the amount of embodied energy and greenhouse gas emissions associated with nuclear-generated electricity. While conventional fossil-fuelled power plants cause emissions almost exclusively from the plant site, the majority of greenhouse gas emissions in the nuclear fuel cycle are caused in processing stages upstream and downstream from the plant. This paper distils the findings from a comprehensive literature review of energy and greenhouse gas emissions in the nuclear fuel cycle, and determines some of the causes for the widely varying results. The most popular reactor types, LWR and HWR, need between 0.1 and 0.3 kWh_th, and on average about 0.2 kWh_th for every kWh of electricity generated. These energy intensities translate into greenhouse gas intensities for LWR and HWR of between 10 and 130 g CO₂-e / kWh_el, with an average of 65 g CO₂-e / kWh_el. While these greenhouse gas are expectedly lower than those of fossil technologies (typically 600-1200 g CO₂-e / kWh_el), they are higher than reported figures for wind turbines and hydroelectricity (around 15-25 g CO₂-e / kWh_el), and in the order of, or slightly lower than solar photovoltaic or solar-thermal power (around 90 g CO₂-e / kWh_el).

Sustainable island businesses: a case study of Norfolk Island

Conventional measures aimed at tackling the energy and waste issues of island communities focus on technological solutions, such as the introduction of renewable energy sources. There exists a history of technology implementations on small islands that have failed because of a lack of continuing skills and financial resources needed for ongoing operation and maintenance. Despite these experiences, what has received little attention so far are measures aimed at achieving island-friendly solutions by reducing their material metabolism, for example by recycling and re-use. The two case studies presented in this work show that conservation, efficiency and reductions of the overall material metabolism of economic activity can be as effective as purely technologically-driven changes. Both case studies demonstrate exceptional sustainability performance in terms of material flow, and greenhouse gas emissions. The income growth scenarios show that – from a sustainability point of view – increasing tourist yield rather than tourist numbers is preferable for coping with price hikes and a finite resource base, and is also more likely to keep within bounds the strain on the island’s people and infrastructure.

On the bioproductivity and land disturbance metrics of the Ecological Footprint

Since the Ecological Footprint was invented, research groups around the world have adapted the concept to their particular circumstances. In particular, researchers have used different metrics that pertain to different research questions. For example, while the metric used by the organisers of the Global Footprint Network expresses bioproductivity requirements in global hectares, an Australian approach examines land disturbance in local hectares. This report - co-authored by researchers from ISA and WWF - follows up on discussions at the Ecological Footprint Forum in Italy (2006). It highlights a number of situations, where managing for bioproductivity alone may lead to counter-productive incentives. We conclude that in these cases, the bioproductivity metric needs to be complemented with additional information such as on land disturbance and biodiversity.

Companies on the Scale: Ecological Footprint of Businesses

Calculating the Ecological Footprint of a company ought to fulfil certain requirements. It has to take into account the direct Footprint impacts such as direct land appropriation and emissions from vehicles and premises. And it also must take account of indirect impacts that are embodied in all the purchases the company makes. As companies and individual (final) consumers are not at the same place in the life-cycle of production and consumption, different calculations and conversion factors have to be applied, otherwise there would be double-counting and non-comparability of Footprints. This report presents an extended input-output approach to calculate Footprints of companies that are truly comparable and discusses the implications for sustainable chain management and sector sustainability.

The Ecological Footprint of Victoria – Assessing Victoria's Demand on Nature

EPA Victoria commissioned Global Footprint Network and the University of Sydney to jointly produce a robust assessment of the State of Victoria’s Ecological Footprint. The purpose of this study was two-fold:

1. Calculate Victoria’s Footprint using two different methods;

2. Assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, with the ultimate goal of making the two methods compatible and consistent.