New Publication: Assessing Company Sustainability Impact

1. Juli 2025

Foto: Wiley Online Library

A new article by Prof. Dr. Timo Busch, Dr. Brigitte Bernard-Rau, and Hendrik Brosche has been published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology under the title “Assessing company sustainability impact: Status quo and way ahead”.

The paper addresses a central challenge in sustainable finance: how to assess the significance of companies’ environmental and social impacts for impact investing. Drawing on life cycle assessment (LCA) literature, the authors examine how existing impact assessment tools in sustainable finance apply LCA logics and explore the conceptual and practical availability of absolute sustainability indicators for investment contexts.

The findings reveal promising foundations—especially for environmental indicators—but also highlight persistent data limitations and conceptual gaps, particularly in incorporating macro-level thresholds to the company level in the social dimension. To advance the field, the authors call for greater interdisciplinary research, improved data integration, and stronger regulatory and practical adoption of absolute sustainability approaches in company impact assessments.

The full article is available open access at https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.70065