Governments at all levels, corporations, non-government organisations and the general public are all engaging with the concept of sustainability. The environment movement first brought the issue of tensions between economic development and environmental quality to the attention of the public about 30 years ago. More recently, the developed world has been struggling with expanding the original concept of sustainable development - meeting environmental concerns whilst maintaining economic development - to a more holistic concept where economic, environmental and social considerations are given more weight.
Recently “sustainable development” has been redefined as managing the social, environmental as well as the economic outcomes of an organisation. These three elements have come to be known as the Triple Bottom Line (TBL). Organisations are progressively realising that there are both ethical and financial benefits to taking a TBL approach to their operations.
There is increasingly an expectation that organisations reduce resource input and waste output while at the same time dealing with the pressure to increase or at least maintain quality of life. In this holistic context it becomes obvious that social, economic and ecological planning and policy development are completely entwined.
Reporting on the Triple Bottom Line allows benchmarks to be set across the whole organisation in one coherent framework. The TBL process of aligning values with policy, planning and actions enables an organisation to identify where to allocate resources and what data collection strategies to employ. Put simply, TBL provides the tool for aligning values, visions and mission.
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