Sustainable Silicon Valley releases handy reference paper describing CSR frameworks

Posted by John Stanley

Companies getting started with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or environmental tracking seem to face a dizzying array of options for how to count, quantify, and report their progress. Which standard do you use for counting carbon? Which third-party should you report it to? What are the standards for the non-environmental aspects of CSR, like labor rights or corporate transparency?

Last week, Sustainable Silicon Valley (SSV) posted a white paper that provides a handy reference guide for answering these questions.  (White Paper on Sustainability Frameworks (Programs, Guidelines, Protocols, Registries). It should be useful  for any company that’s getting started with CSR, or that wishes to adapt its current initiatives to an accepted standard.

The paper covers four major areas:

1. Multiple-attribute programs – Programs, protocols, guidelines, or standards for reporting on multiple aspects of CSR. For example: energy, waste, water, and carbon, or “people, planet, profit”
2. Single-attribute programs – Programs, protocols, guidelines, or standards for reporting on a single aspect of CSR, such as energy use or GHG emissions
3. Registries, indexes, eco-labels, and seals – Third parties to which companies can report CSR information. These third parties typically verify and certify the reported information, and may provide a label or seal of approval.
4. Legislation, mandates, and other government initiatives

Of course, many of these areas overlap. For example, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is both a framework for reporting and a registry to which companies can submit their results. The reference table in Appendix 1 of the paper contains a summary list of all the frameworks, registries, and legislation described, showing what each one includes.

The paper also notes that the GHG Protocol–developed by the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development–is the clear winner where greenhouse gas reporting standards are concerned:

GHG Protocol provides the accounting framework for nearly every GHG standard, program and registry in the world – ISO (ISO 14064), Carbon Disclosure Project, The Climate Registry, California Climate Action Registry, California Air Resource Board, Global Greenhouse Gas Registry, EPA’s Climate Leaders etc., as well as hundreds of GHG inventories prepared by individual companies. –p.21

The GHG Protocol is also used in the Global Reporting Intiative (GRI), another popular framework for multiple aspects of CSR.

The paper does not attempt to cover organizations primarily concerned with carbon trading, credits, or emissions reduction projects, such as:

• Verifiers / Auditors / Certifiers
• Software / Service providers for sustainability tracking
• Carbon Trading / Offsets

The paper doesn’t go much beyond what diligent individuals can find on their own via some online searching–the paper says that most of the program descriptions are taken verbatim from the relevant organizations’ websites. However, Sustainable Silicon Valley has provided a valuable service by doing that work for us, and making the results freely available.