The Total impact table shows your organisation’s total impacts. For example, if you have chosen water use as your indicator, the sheet will show your organisation’s total water use. It is the first stage in a sequence, or hierarchy, of detail. It shows the macro level of detail; further tables show more detail (i.e. the meso level: Software Information 8& 9) followed by even greater detail at the micro level (Software Information 10). This information sheet contains a table; there is no visual representation of the Total impact table.

Total means that impacts include an infinite number of upstream supply chains covering the entire economy and imports. The ISA method does not require you to nominate a boundary or cut-off point in order to perform its calculations, it includes the entire supply chain. The Total impact table deals in absolute numbers. For each indicator there is one number expressed in the appropriate unit (e.g. kg, L, $ etc). For example, if you have chosen water use as your indicator, the sheet will show your organisation’s total water use expressed in Megalitres (ML). MyBakery’s total water use, including all of MyBakery’s upstream supply chains, is 36.9 ML. The sheet also shows the range of total impacts, due to data uncertainty. In this example, there is a 67% chance that MyBakery’s water use is within 24.7 and 55.2 ML. Absolute numbers do not indicate performance and can be deceptive. If a company has a bigger impact it may be simply because it is a bigger company.

Issue addressed by this output

Use this output to address the question: How do my organisation’s total impacts on various indicators measure up against the benchmark (i.e. the mean) for our sector? This output is also useful for identifying your organisation’s progress. It allows you to compare your performance from one year, or one report, to the next.

Underlying calculation

The software reads your data, reads the National Accounts and statistics and performs an input/output analysis.

Table: total impacts

Column one of the table Total impacts contains indicators that you have chosen as appropriate indicators for your company.

The second column MyBakery contains the company’s impact from that particular indicator. For example MyBakery’s total impact on greenhouse gas emissions, for the year of the report, is 412 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2–e), and its contribution to the labour force is 17.2 employment-years.

The third column Benchmark: Pies, cakes and biscuits shows the impact of the whole sector (in this case Pies, cakes and biscuits) to which MyBakery belongs. This benchmark sector was chosen earlier by you when the software prompted you to choose which sector you belonged to. The impact of the benchmark sector is calculated in exactly the same way as MyBakery’s impact, including all upstream supply chains. This allows valid comparisons.

You can see that the impacts from the whole benchmark sector are much greater than the impact from MyBakery. This is because the sector as a whole is bigger than any one company that belongs to the sector.

The final column containing percentages tells you MyBakery’s percentage of the sector’s total impact. For example MyBakery contributes 0.16% of the Pies, cakes and biscuits sector’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Visual representation

There is no visualisation for this output

Using the output

Next: Responsibility chart