Corporate Sustainability Learning Curve

The Planning for Sustainability section of this book offers a range of planning frameworks, from an elaboration on the elements to consider in planning for sustainability and steps to be taken, to broader conceptual frameworks regarding the systems in which business operates, what contributes to their unsustainability, and how to make the systems as well as the companies operating within them more sustainable. 

It should be noted that these frameworks are offered for consideration of how an enterprise may address the issue of planning and implementation of sustainability. Any of these approaches may be used or, alternatively, a company may decide to utilize an existing business management framework and fit sustainability planning and implementation into what is already in place. Regardless of the approach a company takes, this chapter attempts to capture the essence of these alternative frameworks as a way of demonstrating the breadth of ways to move sustainable development into management practice. 

Section 4.3 is titled Environmental Management Systems (EMS) Frameworks for Sustainability. At the very basic level, a management system provides a structure that allows an organization to systematically manage a particular issue by  

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Figure 4.2. Corporate sustainability learning curve. (Adapted from a conceptual model developed for The Stanley Works by BRIDGES to Sustainability and Convergence Consulting, 2004.)...

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