Today, there is a wide variety of methods to assess companies’ impacts on society, people, and nature. Our goal is to create methodologies to ensure greater sustainability, transparency, and comparability in business. We are developing this method in iterative steps. During the last year, we have created version 0.1 of the method and tested it in our member firms. The feedback of our members was published in our first pilot study in May 2021 and is incorporated in version 0.2 of our impact valuation method. Version 0.1 of our papers comprises four papers: The General Method Paper, two papers on environmental and socio-economic impact, and the extended input-output modelling. Version 0.2 of our method comprises of two papers: Impact Statement - Methodology Paper: Social and Economic and Impact Statement: DOWNSTREAM - Industry-Agnostic Guidance.
In the Value Balancing Alliance, we believe that we must comprehensively understand, quantify, and monetize the impact of our business models to sustainably manage our businesses. We are developing impact accounting methodologies with our member companies and partners with the aim of collecting robust, comparable and auditable data.
We are proud that we were also able to successfully carry out the second piloting of the further developed methodology v0.2. Compared to the v0.1 methodology, we have also piloted three additional social indicators - child labor, forced labor and living wages - and gained initial experience with the assessment of the companies' product portfolios. Our members applied the methodology v0.2 to their decision-making such as purchasing and processing raw materials, in addition, more companies from other industries have been able to calculate their impact on society with a reasonable effort.
A joint article by Christian Heller, CEO of the Value Balancing Alliance, Oliver Schwebel, Managing Director of Wirtschaftsförderung Frankfurt GmbH and Gerhard Wiesheu, President of Frankfurt Main Finance for the German Magazine Zeitschrift für das gesamte Kreditwesen.
Out of 40 nominations from 23 countries this year, we are thrilled to be selected as the Honorees of the UNCTAD ISAR Honours 2021 in the international category for the “VBA Impact Statement and Integrated Accounts” initiative.
For us, this is a huge stimulus to further drive our work, enabling decision-makers to be changemakers for a sustainable economy.