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Sustainability > Step
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Your Impacts
“A number of the pressing [sustainability] problems … will require significant behavioural change by businesses and the general public as well as by government. There is still widespread ignorance about the nature of some of these problems and the need for more sustainable solutions.”
The UK Round Table on Sustainable Development Paper Indicators of Sustainable Development, June 2000
Our actions have impacts on society, on the environment and on economic prosperity, both negative and positive. To be more sustainable, we need to reduce the negative and increase the positive.
Many of our everyday actions have some sort of negative impact somewhere along the way, be they at work, at home, in the supermarket or simply travelling between these. In modern society, businesses and individuals can’t simply stop doing everything to cut out the negative impacts completely. What we can do is change our behaviour and actions, choosing options that are less damaging.
To make these choices we need to understand what impacts we have and how we can improve them, from the energy we use in our factories to the water we could conserve at home, from the products that we buy to how much we spend in our local economy. Managing our impacts is simply a process of understanding them, measuring them if appropriate, setting a goal or target for positive change, making sure our colleagues or suppliers (or whoever) agree and then reviewing the process to make sure it works.
There are a wide range of tools, methods, frameworks and information
sources to help understand and measure our impacts. These include
footprinting, lifecycle assessment, baseline reviews, significance
assessments and many others. The SIGMA Management Framework provides some useful guidance on what to use when.
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