Metrics
Initiative of the Center for Sustainable Organizations

A presentation by Mark McElroy highlighting need for Context Based Metrics (CBM) and also shows GRI system of reporting has major weaknesses

COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Context-Based Metrics: Taking Sustainability Literally

This session examines the advent of a new class of indicators in sustainability measurement and reporting known as context-based metrics, or CBMs....

Mark McElroy

This session examines the advent of a new class of indicators in sustainability measurement and reporting known as context-based metrics, or CBMs. Unlike most of what passes for best practice today, CBMs express organizational performance relative to norms, standards or thresholds for what such impacts would have to be in order to be sustainable. Thus, they provide more literal measures of sustainability performance than are typically used, while also responding to the call for context in measurement by the world's leading sustainability reporting standard: GRI. The session will begin with a brief synopsis of contemporary metrics followed by an introduction and description of CBMs in details, with examples included.

Mark McElroy, PhD, Executive Director, Center for Sustainable Organizations and leading researcher in context based metrics