I had an experience with a client recently that is worth sharing.  We've been working with a new metric that deals with the sustainability of water use, corporate water use.  As always, we advocate for measuring and expressing such use in terms of per capita levels of impact, adjusted for employee time spent at work versus not at work.  That way we (a) allocate sustainability impacts to activities found only at work, and (b) avoid the problem of double counting, which would occur if we counted employee impacts at work and not at work without adjusting for such divisions of time.

Anyway, the client raised the objection that if we are expressing, say, water use on a per capita basis (adjusted), then if a company were to, say, invest in some technology which had nothing to do with water use, but had the effect of lowering head count and increasing productivity in econometric terms, performance on the water front would suffer.  For example, imagine a technology that lowered head count by 50 percent, without reducing water use.  This would have the effect of increasing water use per capita by 100 percent.  From an environmental sustainability standpoint, this would be a step backwards, even as it would be a step forwards from a financial standpoint (i.e., fewer employees means less cost).  

Ergo, my client argued, our water metric was flawed.

Our client's logic, however, is seriously flawed.  It is the basic nature of triple bottom line measurement and reporting that the metrics involved proceed along parallel and never intersecting lines, even though single impacts (i.e., investing in some productivity enhancing technology) can affect one or more of them at the same time.  In this case, it is entirely possible that an investment in productivity enhancing technology can, at once, increase productivity, lower costs and head count, and worsen environmental performance.  To say that the effects on productivity, head count and costs should somehow trump environmental performance, or that the fact that environmental performance has been worsened even as one's econometric performance has improved must mean that one's environmental metrics must be flawed, is to fundamentally misunderstand the difference between monetary and natural capital.  The fact is that the growth of monetary capital usually comes at the expense of impacts on natural capital.  So shouldn't our metrics reflect that?

Indeed, it is certainly often the case that impacts have positive impacts on one type of capital even as they have negative impacts on another.  So what?  The fact that this is the case is not to invalidate metrics that faithfully record and report either type of impact.  Rather, it is to affirm the fact that they do.  Let us not shoot the metrics any more than we shot the messenger, shall we?  To object to what a metric accurately reports is not to critique it (the metric), much less invalidate it.  Rather, it is to call attention to what some would have us all hear, despite the truth of what is really happening in the world.  This should be resisted in the strongest possible terms!

Regards,

Mark