Sustainability Focus Areas
These are the high-level groups or areas in which we organize the sustainability indicators as well as objectives. They are based on the definition of sustainable development, balancing economic, environmental and societal needs.
Sustainability Indicators
These are measurable KPIs that can be used for reporting as well as tracking progress and impact when implementing the objectives. They are grouped into the focus areas, and each objective is linked to one or more indicators.
Transparency Dashboards
Based on the indicators we made suggested transparency dashboards that providers can use to publish relevant indicators to ensure trust by society and enable accountability for their progress on their sustainability objectives.
Sustainability Objectives
This is a database of objectives that organizations can adopt in order to reduce and affect the indicators. Each objective comes with a suggested timeline ranging from short-term (over the next 5 years) to long-term (over the next 20 years). Each objective is also linked to a role in the organization, assigning responsibility to different functions within an organization.
Responsible vs. Facilitator
For each objective, we've also assigned whether the provider is the responsible party (meaning that they can implement the objectives themselves) or if they're a facilitator (meaning that their role is to facilitate sustainability improvements for suppliers or customers).
Example: A data center facility may not be responsible for the electronic waste stemming from the disposal of IT equipment by customers. However, they can undertake steps to facilitate that this electronic waste is properly recycled or refurbished.
Best Practices
For each objective, we've researched a comprehensive database of best practices which either come from scientific research or case studies from providers. Some of the information may be provided by vendors - solution vendors themselves. In which case, we have marked it as such and added our review and commentary. Each best practice has an author and a reviewer, and the actual impact on sustainability indicators has been verified by us (though we don’t claim this to be universally true across all regions, countries and use cases).