Scoping Phase Comparison of Development Opportunities by Making Use of Publicly Available Sustainability Information

With sustainable business strategies and sustainability reporting now a norm, the public domain has in recent years been flooded with sustainable development information from a wide range of organizations. Although this information is generally retrospective in nature, an opportunity exists to make use of this information to compare the impact of different development opportunities prospectively, based on the performance of similar industries elsewhere. This paper therefore evaluates the potential of using publicly available sustainability information to enhance scoping phase decision-making by policymakers in order to prioritize projects that have the most potential for creating sustainable outcomes. The paper outlines a concept model for using sustainability information to compare development opportunities, followed by an analysis of five prominent international sustainability reporting frameworks at the hand of specific criteria to establish which framework would be most suitable to serve as basis for such a model.