Given that environmental performance is now high on the agenda of many firms, the lack of comparable and commonly accepted indicators is a major obstacle to continued progress. Corporate environmental managers, especially those under mounting pressure to justify their budgets, have a major stake in measuring environmental performance. For firms operating internationally, across jurisdictions with multiple and conflicting standards, consistent EPIs are a practical necessity to manage environmental performance in an integrated fashion. Using recent business experience, supported by results from the WRI-Tellus survey , this section shows how business is using EPIs. Many companies have adopted environmental policies with lofty goals.
Goals carry no weight, however, unless supported by concrete EPIs.
In short, measuring environmental performance is basic to internal accountability and communication, especially in companies that span the globe. Between 1993 and the year 2000, Nortel set goals to reduce pollutant releases and solid waste disposal by 50 percent, cut paper purchases by 30 percent, and improve overall energy efficiency by 10 percent. Since publishing these targets, Nortel has taken bold steps to measure progress toward these and other environmental goals with a set of EPIs. For internal purposes, Nortel has devised a composite index of individual EPIs and a complex set of scores and weighting factors. This index can serve as a single barometer of environmental performance for senior management, although it must be amenable to disaggregation to track progress on the component parts or compare its environmental performance against another firm's.