Scholarly record

INTRODUCING A NEW REQUIREMENT IN THE ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPACT OF COMPANIES ON THE ENVIRONMENT. THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL APPROACH

Ana Costangioara

Abstract

Companies worldwide are facing the challenge of transitioning to green economy, which is the result of a concerted effort together with governments, agencies, organizations to reduce the environmental burden of the modern activities in all sectors: manufacturing, transportation, energy production, etc. One generally accepted method of transition represents investing in renewable energy. In order to evaluate the impact of these investments indicators, such as NOx emissions, carbon footprint, energy consumption and others, are used by companies, external evaluators, and other stakeholders. When engaging in developing more complex evaluation methods of the impact, the difficulty resides in weighting different dimensions of the said environmental impact in one single model or checklist. This study proposes a new requirement for the impact evaluations performed by companies, by acknowledging the results already obtained by researchers regarding different types of assessments, namely a ?multidimensional approach? of impact assessment. Although there is still no mathematical accurate method of weighting multiple dimensions of the impact, there is known evidence of the fact that one single indicator is not sufficient, which will be highlighted in this paper. Moreover, the case study will underline why and how a multidimensional method must be used in optimizing the impact assessment on the environment and obtaining more accurate results of the evaluation. This will serve both for companies, in order to obtain conclusions that are more relevant, and for other stakeholders, such as governments and agencies, in order to be able to evaluate the activities of the companies and obtain results which can indicate better policies and incentives for enabling the transition process to a green economy.

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