LogFAQs > #878844798

meingott posted...

How do you measure improvements in environmental stewardship, social equity, and economic growth? What metrics do you use? How do you obtain the metrics?

It still depends on what you're improving specifically...

For instance, one element of environmental stewardship is water quality. But if one of the industries in the port produces waste water, and another uses water in their production processes, you can improve both environmental quality and economic efficiency by connecting these two firms together and letting the output from one be the input for another.

Even if you're only trying to measure economic growth narrowly, what metric you use depends on what you're doing. Whether you're investing in new capital infrastructure or just changing policies requires different measurements.

That's why I said someone should be in charge of sustainability efforts if they care about it. Most of this is too contextual to answer in generalities.

meingott posted...

How do you identify what the obstacles and roadblocks are to increasing the amount of stewardship, social equity, and economic growth? What tools or methodologies do you use? What are the most common bottlenecks?

There are a couple of different reporting procedures that have national or international recognition (the EPA and GRI, mainly). I don't expect that my port authority will follow any of them fully, since they probably don't have the financial capability to do a full sustainability audit.

again, what do you mean by bottlenecks?
like in literal terms the bottlenecks happen in a physical form within the various shipping industries and a huge part of sustainability is alleviating those problems through either establishing port infrastructure that reduces idling costs or changing port operations to reduce the number of transactions between ship and store

I think you mean a more figurative bottleneck, though, and I'm not sure what exactly

meingott posted...

When you have to choose between one of the three, how do you prioritize environment stewardship, social equity, and economic growth?

the reason the port wants to pursue sustainability is because multinational businesses like to be able to establish operations in an area that has given a thought to not just their near-term profitability, but also their long-term feasibility

so money, but maintaining your human and natural resource bases is important for your bottom line if you're the kind of company that expects to last for another couple decades
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He would make his mark, if not on this tree, then on that wall; if not with teeth and claws, then with penknife and razor.