Triple Bottom Line: A phrase that describes the long-term improvement in a company`s financial performance through sustainable business practices, including lower capital investments and higher revenues. The triple balance concerns environmental, social and economic sustainability. An approach to corporate reporting that integrates financial and non-financial information (e.g., sustainability) into a single document to show how a business behaves. Carbon footprint: Analysis that focuses on the impact of a product or service on climate change. Therefore, the results are generally presented as a single indicator in kilogram carbon dioxide equivalent (kg CO2eq.). The guidelines are contained in ISO 14067. Climate change: Climate change is a general term for impacts caused by the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other heat-storing gases such as methane (CH4) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). These greenhouse gases (GHGs) absorb infrared light from the sun. Emissions are evaluated by their radiative forcing, which is a measure of their ability to absorb infrared light. Natural greenhouse gases keep the Earth warm enough to support life. Anthropogenic emissions increase infrared absorption, leading to an increase in global average temperature and various local climate changes. Flora and fauna are adapting to climate change at different rates and affecting biodiversity.

Human health is affected, among other things, by the increase in malaria and other tropical infectious diseases, heat stress and floods. Cost-benefit analysis (CBA): Also known as cost-benefit analysis (CBA), is a formal method of organizing evidence on the good and bad impacts of projects and policies. The objective of an CBA may be to decide whether to proceed with a project, to see if the benefits justify the costs, to add value to a project, or to decide which of the various possible solutions would be the most beneficial. To facilitate the comparison of different projects or alternatives to the same project, where costs and benefits may occur in different years, discounting is often used to convert future benefits and costs into a current year perspective. The best criterion for deciding whether a project can be justified is whether the net present value (NPV) is positive. NPV is the monetized present value of expected net benefits (i.e., Benefits minus costs). Other measures (e.g., return on investment, internal rate of return, benefit-cost ratio, simple payback period, or discounted payback period) may also be used to summarize CBA results. CBA is the main methodology underlying the sustainable return on investment (S-ROI) and the triple bottom line (TBL-CBA). More information on Wikipedia.Cumulative Energy Demand (IBD): An impact category that summarizes different energy categories. Measured in MJ. Cut-off method: The cut-off method is the simplest method for modeling end-of-life (EOL).

When a product is recycled at the end of its life, the cut-off method draws the line so that the product (First Life) does not receive environmental credit for recycling, but also has no environmental impact for waste treatment. If a product is made from recycled materials (i.e. second life), the cut-off method completely assigns the recycling/reprocessing load to the product (second life). In this case, no part of virgin material is attributed to the product. Best practices for academic activists: Explore specific career paths for peers to find meaningful employment in renewable energy or startups that are actively committed to sustainability. Show ordinary people how small individual changes, such as reducing red meat consumption, can have an impact. Demands for divestment and recycling programs do not go far. Making sustainability a top priority means knowing the language and terms of a green transition. Knowing key terms can help you have conversations around senior management, as well as with investors, employees, and other stakeholders. Sustainable finance taxonomies are one of the tools developed to support the diversion of financial flows to environmentally (and socially) sustainable activities.