The combination of conflicting goals, spurious claims and self-serving rhetoric could well be more damaging to both social and financial outcomes than focusing on managing intelligently. JL
Julius Bar reports in The Guardian:
The net positive idea challenges companies to think hard about their overall impact on society rather than just in terms of specific social responsibility initiatives. The challenge will be to develop meaningful, auditable metrics that go beyond self-serving rhetoric.
When you walk the aisles of your favourite shop you are bombarded with labels attempting to explain why this product is so much better than those others. It can be overwhelming, and it’s neither a new problem nor one that’s getting better; there are currently at least 465 different eco-labels in use around the globe according to the EcoLabel Index.
Enter a potential new one: net positive. It’s a concept that has been around for a while, but a new project, backed by companies including Dell, Kingfisher and Dow Chemical, aims to boost its use and make it clearer to understand.
It’s an opportunity for companies to demonstrate their positive social and environmental impact. However, the jury is still out on whether the majority of consumers will understand it.
While net positive is broadly understood to be a promise by business to “put more into society than we take out”, there is a fear that without some governance, it has the potential to become a throwaway marketing term with little to no underlying meaning, says John Pflueger, principal environmental strategist at Dell.
So, what exactly is net positive? At its core, it involves measuring a company’s impacts as a result of its operations and products. The positive impacts – anything from reduced greenhouse gas emissions due to fuel-efficient vehicles to the social benefits resulting from good supply chain practices – are the company’s handprint, or what a company adds to the world. A footprint is what it takes away.For technology company Dell, which has been reporting its social and environmental impacts for more than a decade, net positive can be a way to encourage it to do more.
In 2013, Dell announced its aim to make its overall positive impacts 10 times greater than its negative impacts by 2020. It has attempted to do this with a net positive assessment of the impacts of its programme that helps employees work from home.
The immediate benefit of the scheme is to improve employees’ work-life balance. It also found a greenhouse-gas benefit, with the handprint of the scheme more than 200 times greater than its footprint, according to the company. It saves 1.15 metric tons of emissions per employee per year (for example by reducing the days they commute to an office, as well as reducing Dell’s need for office space and the costs and emissions that go with it). The emissions associated with implementing the programme (such as increased energy use in the data centres powering software to connect remote employees) are just 0.0057 metric tons of emissions per year.Calculating this top-line result, however, required a level of expertise and effort that would be daunting to most companies. And it could be just as hard, if not impossible, to communicate such complexity on product packaging.
“You might not buy a product that says ‘this product is 5x net positive’ because it’s hard for a consumer to know what that means, but you might see a product that says ‘this product achieves XYZ, or this product is net positive because...’”, says David Korngold of US non-profit BSR.
Regardless of whether it appears on a label or not, net positive – at least by the definition being created by the project members – is expected to deepen an individual company’s sustainability efforts. “You can’t figure out your net positive impact in a vacuum,” says Korngold. “You have to figure out how your products and solutions are affecting other companies and consumers.”
Net positive could also reframe the way companies view their sustainability work. Josh Prigge, the director of regenerative development at Fetzer Vineyards, a major wine producer in California, explains the difference between traditional sustainability goals and a net positive mindset.
“If a company just says, ‘our big goal is to reduce greenhouse gases by 20%, or reduce water by 20%, or energy by 20%’ ... then you’re still 80% bad,” Prigge says. “I think the goal should be for everyone to be net positive and completely eliminate their negative impacts.”
Fetzer says communicating its net positive commitment to wine shoppers may never take the form of on-bottle labelling or messaging, but it is in its overall brand communication and how the company defines its impact.
In the meantime, all that’s left to be worked out in calculating net positive, is well just about everything, says Pflueger. Its partners in the new project will need to develop methodologies for specific areas like water and greenhouse gases as well as guidance for companies that want to set net positive goals. And because every company will need to address different social and environmental impacts to reach net positive, members will be casting a wide net in their approaches.
It’s this vague definition that is potentially problematic says Andrew Crane, director of the Centre for Business, Organisations and Society at Bath University: “The net positive idea is exciting because it challenges companies to think hard about their overall impact on society rather than just in terms of specific social responsibility initiatives. The challenge though will be to develop meaningful, auditable metrics that go beyond self-serving rhetoric. If the members are serious about doing that it could be game changing.”
Pflueger admits “there are far more questions now with regards to net positive than there are answers”. “But we if don’t start working on these, we’re not going to get anywhere. We don’t want to use the fact that we don’t fully understand this as an excuse for inaction.”
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