Supporting Sustainability Decisions in Large Organisations

Sustainability management systems are important technologies used by large organisations to monitor and control their CO2 emissions and other environmental impacts. So far, these systems have been designed to support data collection and reporting mandated by regulations, but they provide little support for decision making in order to improve an organisation’s environmental sustainability. In this paper, we present a systematic method to help organisations make such decisions. Our method builds on goal-oriented requirements engineering for modelling an organisation’s sustainability goals and on statistical decision analysis for guiding decisions under uncertainty. By being explicit about uncertainty, our method provides a sound assessment of the risks associated with alternative options (including the “business as usual” option), and, through the concept of information value, informs decision makers whether reducing uncertainty through additional data collection will be useful for their decisions. We illustrate our approach on real sustainability decision questions at UCL’s Department of Computer Science.