How “thresholds & allocations” relate to “carrying capacities of capitals”

Here is a note from Mark McElroy:

Now that the Impact Management Platform, a collaboration between leading providers of standards for assessing sustainability performance, has openly embraced the concepts of thresholds and allocations in accounting, it seems fair to suggest that these ideas now qualify for recognition as best practice.

Having myself been deeply involved in their initial development since 2005, now also seemed like a good time to produce a short synthesis of what these core principles actually mean and how they relate to a third one of vital importance, the carrying capacities of capitals: “Thresholds, Allocations and the Carrying Capacities of Capitals: Core Principles in Sustainability and Integrated Accounting.”

For anyone interested in understanding what it means for sustainability or integrated accounting to be authentic, it is my hope that this new primer of mine will be helpful. At the same time, I also hope it will help explain why so much of what passes for mainstream practice in ESG and impact accounting and monetization truly fail to address sustainability performance per se. Without explicitly addressing thresholds, allocations and the carrying capacities of capitals, there’s simply no way they can in any sort of authentic or meaningful way.

For those interested in going even deeper on this topic, it should be useful to point out that thresholds, allocations and the carrying capacities of capitals correspond to only four of twelve core principles in sustainability and integrated accounting. For a more complete understanding of this, I recommend practitioners familiarize themselves with what I call “Generally Accepted Integrated Accounting (GAIA) Principles.”