About Us
Gaia Metrics helps companies and investors discover, qualify and truly understand the financial risk attached to environmental and social factors in their operations and supply chains.
And we attach financial value to these risks, because their materiality informs decisions that can impact lives, jobs and fortunes.
Sustainability issues are strategic
Environmental and social issues are increasingly relevant to companies’ bottom lines; impacting sales, costs and profits. This is shifting the discussion from the community affairs office to the CFO’s office and the Boardroom.
A rising tide.
The sustainability trend is decades in the making. More and more, companies are hearing from – and reacting to pressure from – ethical investors, consumers and community groups. And they’re responding to the threat to their brand and reputation.
And there are dollar implications. Organizations of every stripe are paying for the environmental and social effects of business decisions in the form of taxes, fines, license to operate, explicit charges, new supply chain responsibilities, consumer demand and market pricing pressure.
Pricing changes behavior
Yet many companies struggle to manage environmental and social issues because they don’t have a way to measure their financial risk, or a framework to assess them along side other business assets and liabilities.
These companies may miss the true impact of greenhouse gas and climate change regulations, or of dependency on depleting water and other natural resources. They may fail to recognize opportunities in new markets and to extract increased efficiencies in old markets. They may stumble because they lack transparency into suppliers and supply chains. And they may fall short of being good corporate citizens in the communities in which they do business.
Being diligent
Employee exposure to toxic materials, health and safety problems, product liability and suppliers’ child labor practices are among the environmental and social issues that can quickly become reputation killers. Ethical business leaders work hard to understand and resolve these issues before they become big problems. Gaia Metrics helps them prove the appropriate diligence should the need arise.
SDR as starting point
For many companies the Sustainable Development Report has been the end goal of their sustainability initiative. Gaia Metrics turns this convention upside down by making the SDR the starting point – Gaia Metrics transforms the SDR from a community relations statement to financial and management discussion, using SDR data to fuel analysis of environmental and social factors risk.
Apples to apples
Knowing your company’s CO2 output per employee is interesting. On the other hand knowing how you compare -- on CO2 and some 100 other indicators -- to other companies in your industry is actionable business knowledge. Gaia Metrics Benchmarks provide the insight business leaders need to make informed decisions, and provide a profoundly useful metric for investors and also managers of portfolios and ratings services.