PROFISTAT

LIFE04 ENV/GB/000815

688 674,00 €

2004

Economic activity is the key cause of major environmental problems, from global warming to biodiversity, from acidification to ozone depletion and loss of biodiversity. Because appropriate tools for integrating environmental aspects into everyday financial decision-making are lacking, financial market decisions can cause a gross environmental burden. One contributing factor is how existing tools fall back on a natural-science based logic that is incompatible with the rationale underpinning resource allocation decisions in the financial markets. All current approaches to eco-rating concentrate on the way the environmental burden is created by a company's economic activities. There have been a range of theoretical approaches that have attempted to solve the problem of expressing the burden of economic activity on environmental resources, but most of them fail in practice.

The project, lasting 27 months, has been a technical success, surpassing what had been outlined in the proposal. The single most important output of the project was the Advance survey. This key deliverable of the project was to be a survey of 50 companies employing the SV approach. In the end, 65 companies were included. One industrial sector was particularly well surveyed: The project managed to achieve more than 50% coverage of companies involved in the automobile sector. Additionally, the project published a handbook that explains how to conduct sustainable value assessments and furthermore trained practitioners in the mechanism via a series of workshops. Sustainable value (SV) follows the example of the financial markets. There, investors face a similar problem. Capital is a resource without a price tag. To assess the cost of capital, investors make use of the opportunity cost principle. The cost of a resource corresponds to the value that could have been created if the resource was used in another way. SV uses the same logic, but to price environmental and social resources. The Advance project focussed specifically on environmental resources, however. To price the environmental resource use of 65 European companies, the project compared the return that the companies generated with their environmental resources to the return the economies of the EU 15 countries would have generated with exactly this set of environmental resources on average. In a second scenario, the companies’ return was compared to the return the EU 15 countries envisage to achieve in the year 2010. This more ambitious return in 2010 is the result of a) tougher environmental goals that foresee the reduction of environmental impacts and b) envisaged environmental growth. The survey showed that the environmental performance of European companies varies widely both within and between different sectors. Taking the automobile sector as an example, the survey showed that amongst the large European automobile manufacturers, the sector leader uses its environmental resources seven times more efficiently than the sector laggard. However, the environmental performance of companies is also largely determined by which sector they are in. Sectors that rely heavily on research and development tend to create SV. The best companies are operating on a factor four level today, i.e., they are using their environmental resources four times more efficiently than the market average. The automobile sector, pharmaceuticals and engineering and machinery are good examples of this, while resource-based industries, the oil and gas sector, the chemical industry and utilities re typically five times or more less efficient than the market average. This demonstrates the tremendous potential of structural change for sustainable development in these sectors.

decision making support / financial instrument /

University of Leeds