Corporate Social Responsibility

Types of Social Responsibility: Sustainability

One type of corporate social responsibility focuses on three key dimensions of sustainability - environmental, social, and economic.

Key Takeaways

Key Points

Sustainability generally refers to a company's capacity to endure over the long term through renewal, maintenance, and sustenance. From an organizational perspective, it includes stewardship for sustaining not just the organization but also its various stakeholders.
While a universally accepted definition of sustainability remains elusive, according to a common definition, sustainability has three key dimensions: environmental, social, and economic.
Tracking sustainability measures can be performed through sustainability accounting, in which a corporation discloses its performance with respect to activities directly affect the social, environmental, and economic performance of an organization.
Environmental aspects can relate to water, land, and atmospheric impact, including energy and chemical use. Social sustainability can include human and worker rights and community issues. Economic aspects can include financial transparency and accountability and corporate governance.

Key Terms

stewardship: The act of caring for or improving with time.
impact: A significant or strong influence; an effect.

Many efforts to show corporate social responsibility, or CSR, focus on environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Sustainability is the capacity to endure over the long term through renewal, maintenance, and sustenance. From an organizational perspective, sustainability is a criteria used to make decisions about business conduct and to evaluate outcomes.

Environmental sustainability involves efforts to protect air, water, and land from any harmful effects. It also encompasses stewardship for natural resources, such as trees and wildlife. Sustainable business practices consider not only the use of resources in production, but also the assurance that those resources can be replenished for future use. Energy is another area of interest in environmental sustainability. Reducing greenhouse gasses harmful to the atmosphere and embracing alternative, renewable fuel sources such as wind and energy are examples of business practices in this area.

The social dimension of sustainability addresses concerns such as peace and social justice. Efforts to improve education, to expand worker rights, to minimize the use of child labor, and to increase the political empowerment of women, especially in developing countries, are examples of social sustainability practices. Reducing poverty by helping people develop the skills to earn their own livelihoods is another example of social sustainability. Projects that provide access to clean water and sanitation are also aimed at improving social sustainability by reducing illness and mortality rates.

Economic sustainability refers to business practices that do not diminish the prospects of future persons to enjoy levels of consumption, wealth, utility, or welfare comparable to those enjoyed in the present. This means companies' operational practices reduce environmental damage and resource depletion. Efforts to influence business practices toward economic sustainability include pricing mechanisms, such as carbon taxes, that pass on the cost of environmental impact to the users of those resources.

Triple bottom line: Sustainable design of a business can be an aspect of corporate social responsibility.

Tracking sustainability measures can be performed using sustainability accounting, in which a corporation discloses its performance with respect to activities that have a direct impact on the societal, environmental, and economic performance of an organization. According to common definitions, sustainability has three key dimensions: environmental, social, and economic. The three pillars - also known as the "triple bottom line" - have served as a common ground for numerous sustainability standards and certification systems in recent years, though a universally accepted definition of sustainability remains elusive.