This is the story of a massively successful project that aggregates and discloses data about sustainable behaviour: www.cdp.net.
I call the approach “name and shame” and I use it in variations all the time. But the scale of success with CDP is different. It began 20 years ago under the name carbon disclosure project and was a database to report the CO2 footprint of companies to financial investors. At the time, most companies responded with resistance or denial to disclose. But CDP continued their effort and companies began to understand that the financial markets regarded carbon management as a risk thus as a parameter of the companies market performance and their access to capital. A good HBR article to read about this is “The Comprehensive Business Case for Sustainability”.
In the meantime, CDP is a huge database where 9500+ corporate, 800+ cities and 100+ states/regions report about environmental data (climate change, water scarcity and deforestation). This data is then used by investors, purchasers and other stakeholders to make informed choices. On their platform, CDP claims that with this data to control 590 investors with over USD 110 trillion in assets and 200+ large purchasers with over USD 5.5 trillion in procurement spend. And if you look at the list of participants and the testimonials, the effect may even be greater than that.
At the heart of all this is a sophisticated database build on Socrata that allows not only for download in various formats but also for interactive interpretation. Very nice.
Why do I write this post? Good news is that there are are tangible business benefits from not making profits on the expense of our planet. This forces companies to behave as we all want them to behave: not hurting our ecosystem externalising costs. In this case is not yet the consumer market making decisions, but financial community is anticipating by assessing the cost of no sustainable behaviour. I hope very much that a mechanism like this will soon kick in in relation to hurting society. Thank you CDP.
