1. For the Sustainability Compendium, Brasil Foreword By Hazel Henderson

I welcome this Sustainability Compendium as an indispensible guide to the key new tools for management in the 21st century. Anne Louette brings deep expertise and insight into the assessment of all these tools for measuring social and environmental performance of companies, governments and civic organizations worldwide.

This research covers a wide spectrum, identifying the new models, metrics, indicators and methodologies employed in this paradigm shift toward managing human societies for long-term sustainability. For the accounting and statistical professions, sustainability reporting represents the greatest revolution since the invention of double-entry bookkeeping.

The early response of statisticians, accountants, business schools and corporate management was to dismiss all the new data and events provided by changes in the Earth eco-systems, from pollution, losses of biodiversity and desertification to floods, fires and extreme weather variability which were the earliest signs of climate change. Today, we understand that the planet is our programmed learning environment, teaching humans directly, holding up a mirror to our behavior, belief-systems and values. The Earth is showing us which of our ways of being and doing are now unsustainable, from waste and trivial consumerism to continuous quarterly rises in corporate profits and fantasies of limitless GDP-growth.

One of the deepest errors that sustainability reporting corrects is the worldwide confusion propagated by conventional economics which equates money with wealth. As we see by the rise in commodity prices, real wealth lies in natural resources and the services that healthy ecosystems provide to humans. We are learning these lessons in multiple ways, from oil prices and understandable resource nationalism, that has now brought over 77% of the world´s proven oil reserves under the control of governments rather than private companies and markets. The geo-politics of the new resource scarcities have invalidated economic textbook assumptions that air, water and biodiversity were "free goods."

Wars and military approaches to dispute-settlement are clearly obsolete. Today we see military experts and generals on TV warning us that there are no military solutions in Iraq, Georgia or in today´s unfolding order where the USA is no longer the world´s superpower. Multi-lateral negotiations and sustainable forms of development will continue to be the main geo-politics of the 21st century. Today´s weapons of choice are currencies, natural resources and the race toward universal education, scientific and technological innovation beyond the fossil-fueled Industrialism of the past 300 years – toward the Solar Age of cleaner, greener economies that work with Nature, not against her.

Human societies have been slowly adapting to all these Earth changes – each in their own culturally determined ways. These adaptation processes within governments and corporations have been encouraged by the rise of civil society: "grassroots globalists" convened in 1999 in Porto Alegre at the first gathering of the now truly global World Social Forum. The rise of the global information society, thanks to the internet, now is morphing into a new Age of Truth where citizens can expose corporate and government wrong-doing and damage a company´s brand, reputation and stock price in real time.

Hence, the crucial importance of all the new models, metrics, indicators and other tools for social and environmental management compiled in this volume, which allows comparability, communication between practitioners and acceleration of methodological advances.

This book also meets the needs of everyday managers, as well as academics who must rapidly overhaul curricula in business schools worldwide. Here, Brasil has also pioneered through the ground-breaking work of the Instituto Ethos, Uni-Ethos and such management institutes as Fundacao dom Cabral, Fundação Getulio Vargas and Amana-Key Desinvolvimento y Educacao, Willis Harman House and the World Business Academy. New media can accelerate social learning as with my Ethical Markets Media, LLC, in the USA and Europe and our partner, Mercado Etico in Brasil.

While corporations have made much progress in sustainability reporting, finance is still catching up: The UN Principles of Responsible Investing (now representing $15 trillion in managed assets) and the Carbon Disclosure Project ($54 trillion) are leading the way, together with the Equator Principles and BOVESPAS´s ISE Index. Capital asset pricing models still need to fully incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria, and the Global Reporting Initiative´s triple-bottom line needs to be extended to all global corporations and security analysis.

The implosion of Wall Street´s risk-analyses models and the reckless use of leverage, derivatives, speculation and short-selling provide a tragic lesson on the vital role of ethics and trust in all markets. The limits of greed, self-interest, envy, avarice, accumulation, hoarding and excessive competition, all deadly sins in most religions, are now clear. And at last, after decades of effort, the childish fantasies of an ever-growing GDP are facing up to reality.

I was present at the signing of Agenda 21 in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 where over 170 countries agreed to overhaul their GDP accounting. I presented at the European Parliament´s "Taking Nature into Account" conference in 1995. I created the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators with the Calvert Group in 2000 (updated regularly at www.calvert-henderson.com). I was honored to present these indicators at the Parliament of Latin America, EUROSTAT and many other venues in China, Japan, Australia, and in 2003 in Curitiba at the ICONS conference where 700 business leaders and statisticians endorsed the many new "quality of life" metrics needed in national accounts ("Statisticians of the World Unite!" at www.hazelhenderson.com).

In 2007, I co-organized the "Beyond GDP" debate in the European Parliament where another 700 members of parliament and statisticians endorsed all these same corrections to GDP. Globescan of London and Ethical Markets Media, LLC, conducted a survey in 10 countries for the European Commission on the Beyond GDP issue. Huge majorities in all 10 countries, including Brasil (69%) supported correcting GDP to help steer countries toward sustainability (www.beyond-gdp.eu). Even the USA is awakening, and the Senate held hearings in March 2008 on "Re-thinking GDP."

With this important Sustainability Compendium, all these issues from local to corporate to global come together in a superb overview to guide us to a better future.

Hazel Henderson
St. Augustine, Florida, September 2008