Over a dozen companies, including The B Team members Allianz and Kering, have come together as an informal group called the “Impact Valuation Roundtable” (IVR). Their goal is to build on and operationalize frameworks like the Natural and Social Capital Protocols, which seek to quantify and monetize the natural and human resources which are the foundation of economic activity.

By sharing best practices and learnings, the group aims to facilitate uptake and implementation of available natural and social capital concepts; identify benefits and limitations of different approaches and achieve increased alignment on valuation techniques and data sources used.This valuable user-driven push for consistency and comparability is essential to accelerate progress towards integrated performance management. The IVR companies state their ultimate goal for impact valuation as:

“By taking a macro-societal perspective on the business contribution to society, we believe that impact valuation can support large and small companies alike to ensure long-term, successful and sustainable value creation for all stakeholders by more comprehensive reporting, integrated thinking, better risk assessment and strategic decision making.”

The first Impact Valuation Roundtable White Paper, released at WBCSD’s member event in March 2017, highlights ongoing challenges and commits to tackle them collaboratively.

A key element of the IVR has been Kering’s Environmental Profit and Loss (EP&L) methodology to showcase best practices in corporate natural capital accounting. Kering was a pioneer in this space, creating the EP&L in 2012 and embedding it throughout its business activities to measure, monetize and manage the resulting environmental impacts.

Alongside The B Team member Kering, Allianz has joined the initiative through their global industry insurer, AGCS. From an industrial insurance perspective, quantifying and monetizing sustainability impacts and dependencies is also an important step towards more transparency, comparability and awareness when it comes to corporate sustainability risks. Such an enhanced perspective of these existing and emerging risks in the environmental, social and governance field can enable companies to design the right risk management solutions accordingly.