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Sustainability encompasses the practice of maintaining the well‐being of the natural world and the responsible use of natural resources as well as how you sustainably grow, staff, and profit from your work. The practice of Sustainability includes a rapidly‐evolving set of disciplines that differ significantly from organization to organization, depending on the organization’s business. Sustainability‐related job functions and titles include:

• Environment, Health and Safety (EHS). Originally a function designed to satisfy compliance with early 20th century workplace safety, the EHS professions evolved into the core of many organizations’ sustainability and environmental regulatory reporting functions, especially in manufacturing environments.

• Climate Change. As scientific evidence has conclusively shown that greenhouse gas (GHG) emission‐caused climate change is largely the result of human and business activities, companies have started deploying executives tasked with limiting GHG emissions.

• Carbon, Water, and Energy Accounting and Data Verification. Driven by rapidly‐increasing investor and regulator interest in disclosure of GHG, water, and energy‐related costs and risks, the ranks of practitioners and service providers skilled in accounting for and verifying the costs and risks have started to swell.

• Sustainability Systems Management (IT/IS). Integrating the ability to track environment, climate change and supply chain impact data into organizations’ enterprise data processing capabilities has become a significant area of focus within IT/IS functions.

• Sustainable Supply Chain and Procurement. As stakeholder concerns for sustainability impacts, costs and risks throughout an organizations’ supply chain have grown, so have company functions in managing the sustainability of the supply chain and procurement.

• Sustainable Marketing and Production. Since the majority of large‐cap and mid‐cap companies now have at least one product or brand with a sustainability‐related value proposition1, a subset of marketing and production professionals are today identifying themselves with the new practices.

Presentations from CRO Summit Spring 2010 in Boston, MA

• The Corporate Energy Saving Revolution--Making Money by Using Less Energy, Tim Healy, EnerNOC
• Structuring, Budgeting, & Planning Corporate Responsibility Programs: Findings from the CR Best Practices Survey, Richard Crespin, CROA