Why Should We Track Sustainability?

A guest article written by Aimee Henning.

Sustainability recognises the interdependence between the environment and social and economic factors, requiring a holistic and integrated approach. It should involve collaboration between multiple stakeholders enabling cooperation amongst all branches of a business.

By tracking sustainability inputs, we can measure our progress in a standardised way, allowing organisations to set targets against current performance and evaluate the effectiveness of sustainability initiatives within a set performance period. 

By tracking our sustainability data, we can communicate our progress in a transparent and accountable manner within our organisation, as well as to external stakeholders.

This allows us to identify potential environmental, social, and governance risks.  Examples could be identifying high areas of consumption or vulnerabilities within our supply chains, which allows us to develop early mitigation strategies to improve our resilience.

By tracking our sustainability metrics, we can identify areas that allow us to save costs, reduce consumption and waste, and improve our operational efficiencies by streamlining sustainability practices. This will lead to improved stakeholder engagement which will positively impact our shared understanding and responsibility that allows our organisation to stay relevant and compliant within the global and local regulations.

Tracking Sustainability Metrics and Common Challenges

Because of the complexities associated with monitoring the quantitative and qualitative metrics, most organisations are deterred from starting their sustainability journey.  Because of the differences in reporting guidelines and industry standards, most people do not know how to identify the most important data points to track within their daily operations. 

Quite often, the process is started by someone who already has time and resource constraints, and in the absence of a sustainability or environmental manager or department, can fall behind with data inputs. This conflicts with the dynamic nature of sustainability tracking which requires continuous improvement and adaption to be able to determine baseline information to inform future performance.

Data management can also present a challenge when not all data is or can be captured in the same, standardised way. Some qualitative data can be subjective, especially when it tracks employee engagement as well as well-being, social impact, and community engagement. Subjective data presents its own challenges when tracking data.

In order to make the data relevant, it needs to be contextualised and visualised to successfully communicate sustainability information, which will drive action and highlight significant progress with previous goals.

Introducing Weeva and How It Can Assist with Sustainability Management

Weeva has been developed as a digital sustainability platform for the tourism sector, which allows a holistic 360° view of their impact beyond resource consumption (energy and water usage, waste management).  By using the Weeva 360° Framework, users can develop a balanced scorecard that covers the 4Cs of Conservation, Community, Culture, and Commerce to provide a holistic overview of operational impact.

Weeva also assists with data collection, hosts educational guides, and offers tasks and tools within each focus area.  Weeva’s framework is based on a LMMME framework: Learn, Measure, Manage, Meet and Exceed. This allows users to identify the areas to work on, collect data, and input the relevant data.

Other Sustainability Tools

Apart from Weeva, there are a range of tools available for tracking sustainability management. These vary from full stack sustainability management software (data collection, tracking metrics, goal setting, reporting) to sustainability reporting platforms which focus on providing frameworks for reporting and disclosure.

Within logistics, there are supply chain management tools to track supplier compliance and performance to drive change.  Within carbon and energy management, there are tools that assist with tracking and reducing consumption as well as carbon emissions. There are also dedicated social impact analysis and assessment tools, which track and demonstrate social value. There are a number of data visualisation tools that allow users to create interactive dashboards to visualise sustainability metrics effectively. 

When selecting a sustainability tracking tool, it is important to consider the specific needs and goals of the organisation; and consider factors such as: ease of use, data security and integration within an existing data management system.

Other Key Points

Because of the far-reaching impact of the hospitality sector, there is a movement away from tracking only the traditional sustainability inputs like energy efficiency, waste reduction and recycling programmes, water conservation, and sustainable sourcing and procurement. Sustainability tracking is now expanding to monitor and track data which promotes local and cultural preservation as well as to support community development.

By capturing and communicating our sustainability data, you enable travellers to make informed decisions.  Through growing industry collaborations, you can drive sustainability initiatives on a broader scale.  Collectively, through our combined efforts, we can create a more sustainable tourism sector.

Just start. Every bit counts.