Jan. 9, 2008 Ben & Jerry's has piloted an unusual program to measure the company's social, as opposed to environmental, impact in the area of climate management. The program applied a relatively new reporting standard called the Global Warming Social Footprint (GWSF) to find out whether Ben & Jerry's was contributing "its proportionate share" toward returning global greenhouse gas concentrations to safe levels.

"To reverse climate change, an effective mix of human, social, and constructed (or built) capital is required so as to make related solutions (i.e., collective action) possible," according to the Center for Sustainable Innovation (CSI), which pioneered the standard. "A proportionate share of what it will take to create such capitals can then be allocated to any company as its own standard of performance."

GWSF is based on CSI's Social Footprint Method, which measures a company's social sustainability impact against a recognized standard of performance. In Ben & Jerry's case, that standard was based on the "WRE350 scenario," a climate model that specifies a normative pattern of emissions required to stabilize CO2 concentrations to safe levels by 2150. The safe level specified in the WRE350 plan is 350 parts per million (ppm), as compared to present levels of approximately 385 ppm.

The results? "Ben & Jerrys manufacturing plants emitted 6,279 net tons of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide over the six years from 2001-2006, which is just 133 tons more carbon than our share of the WRE350 Plan allows," Ben & Jerry's said in its report. "We therefore missed our cumulative WRE350 target by 2.2% during the years from 2001-2006."

"[GWSF] is the only greenhouse gas measurement and reporting tool that actually compares an organization's impacts on climate change with norms for what such impacts ought to be in order to reverse climate change," says CSI executive director Mark W. McElroy. "Here, we are quite literally operationalizing the social side of triple bottom line reporting."

GWSF has been used to measure and report the emissions performance of several other multi-national corporations using publicly available data, including Shell, BT, BP, GM, Ford, DuPont and several others. Find the results here (PDF).