The idea of triple-bottom-line reporting has been around for some time and is behind concepts such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and socially responsible investing. The ability to link social and environmental impacts to flows of money (from consumption) through the economy was demonstrated by Wassily Leontief in the 1970s; the father of input-output (IO) supply-chain analysis went on to win a Nobel Prize. Today, routine, comparable, integrated analysis of a range of indicators using IO is possible – at a highly disaggregated local level as well as extending to global supply chains – because of developments by ISA and other research groups across the world.
Globally, the environmental and social impacts of international trade have been synthesised in a review in Nature Geoscience co-authored by academics at the University of Sydney and UNSW; as summarised in this University of Sydney report.
A family of economic, social and environmental indicators is now available for comprehensive analysis via the global multi-regional IO database GLORIA , which ISA built for the United Nations using our virtual Industrial Ecology Laboratory (IELab) infrastructure. Prior to the IELab’s development, ISA researchers with CSIRO carried out the first IO triple-bottom-line analysis of the Australian economy; the background of this project as well as details about the methodological advantages underpinning IO are in the TBL project page archives. Access to GLORIA and the other IELab databases has always been free for academics, and is commercialised through FootprintLab, a University-of-Sydney spinout co-founded by ISA PhD candidate Janet Salem, formerly of the UN, and Dr Tim Baynes, formerly of CSIRO.
Indicators in the IELab cover income, employment, greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, land and water use, potential species loss and more.