Bob Humphries & Sergey Volatovsky

Measuring the true bottom line

Bob Humphries & Sergey Volatovsky
Water Corporation of Western Australia

Abstract:
Australian water utilities are implementing a scientifically rigorous, quantitative, consistent and comprehensive approach to reporting their triple bottom line (TBL) impacts, particularly their Ecological Footprint. The software tool that does this is called Bottomline3, and has been developed by the Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis (ISA) at the University of Sydney.

Bottomline3 can be used by organisations of all sizes for TBL accounting, as well as for Carbon and Ecological Footprint analysis, which are subsets of the TBL. The ISA approach reveals current and potential environmental, social and economic risks because it calculates the true "bottom line".

The ISA approach uses important indicators like greenhouse gas emissions; land disturbance and water use, and calculates their effect in TBL terms throughout the full supply chain, covering the entire economy. Bottomline3 takes into account the full impacts of the activity of a business, including those of the supply chain, thus avoiding the problem of partial reporting of impacts and "greenwash".

The data requirements for Bottomline3 are straightforward, and available in any business. The ISA software requires only an organisation’s expenditure and revenue accounts, plus some on-site data such as land disturbance, and direct water and energy use. No additional data collection is necessary.