Division of Information Technology, Engineering and the Environment
Institute for Sustainable Systems and Technologies
Institute for Sustainable Systems and Technologies
Dr Manfred
LenzenSenior Research Fellow, University of Sydney
Research Interests
Manfred is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney. He has
a PhD in Nuclear Physics from the University of Bonn in Germany. He has
worked for 5 years on renewable energy technologies, such as passive
solar architecture, vacuum glazing and wind turbines. For the past 6
years, his work has been in the field of Ecological Economics, with a
focus on Environmental Impact Studies, Ecological Footprint methodology,
Triple Bottom Line and Sustainability Reporting for organisations,
sustainable consumption and trade, the Kuznets hypothesis, Economic
Systems Research, Multi-Criteria Decision Making methodology, and
Industrial Ecology. Manfred's emphasis is on sound mathematical
underpinnings for methods in the interdisciplinary field of Ecological
Economics.
Triple Bottom Line / Sustainability reporting is widely
advanced as a way in which firms and institutions can realise broader
societal objectives in addition to increasing shareholder value. In our
framework for the Australian economy, we integrate financial
input-output tables that describe the inter-dependencies between
economic sectors, with national social and environmental accounts to
construct numerate 'triple bottom line' accounts for 2700 discrete
economic sectors. Thus for a firm, or an industry sector, financial
aspects of performance can for example be expressed as’dollars of gross
operating surplus per dollar of output’. Social performance is measured
for example by ‘minutes of employment generated per dollar’. Climate
change issues are indicated by ‘kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted per
dollar’.
Since these indicators of 'triple bottom line' performance are
referenced against financial units and are consistent with the System of
National Accounts, they can be applied to financial data of a service or
product, a firm, an industry sector, a population, or a region
/state/nation, and allow a robust triple bottom line account to be
developed across a range of scales. The critical advantage of this
approach is that it represents an economy-wide life-cycle analysis
without boundaries. It includes both the direct or immediate effects as
well as the indirect or diffuse effects associated with a large and
distant chain of supply paths. The incorporation of all the indirect or
upstream effects therefore removes any problems associated with a choice
of boundary. Products, firms, industry sectors, populations and regions
can therefore be assessed properly in sustainable chain management
terms. Thus a firm that uses a key intermediate input requiring a large
amount of water for example, cannot ‘outsource’ or ‘de-merge’ the
environmental implications since they are revealed in the analysis of
the full production chain. This revelation also enables meaningful
benchmarking of firms featuring different degrees of vertical
integration, and the management of risk in a holistic, economy-wide
context. Finally, it provides incentives and support for ‘green
procurement’, because it underpins change and improvement processes
acting on the entire inter-related production network, as opposed to
considering only on-site impacts.
