Center for Sustainable Business | Return on Sustainability Investment (ROSI™)

CSB offers extensive resources on ROSI for current and future business leaders to better understand how sustainability drives financial performance, including:

CSB partners with companies to deploy ROSI and unlock financial value within organizations. During the ROSI collaboration process, we will:
> Identify strategies and key practices to explore
> Conduct research and interviews to determine benefits and construct monetization frameworks
> Analyze company data and perform monetization analyses and investigations
> Deliver key project findings that can be leveraged in core business strategy moving forward
> Educate and train senior leadership on applying ROSI internally throughout the firm
 

With support from HSBC Bank USA, NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business partnered with a set of apparel companies on the ROSI methodology to estimate the value of tangible and intangible benefits that apparel companies can accrue by making strategic investments in more sustainable business practices. We engaged companies including EILEEN FISHER, Reformation, and REI in the project, and conducted both primary and secondary research leveraging industry experts, company contacts, and academic literature to inform our framework.

The Food and Agriculture Sustainable Strategies Framework was designed applying the ROSI methodology in three HSBC-funded projects with Anheuser-Busch, Hero Group, and Ingredion as well as various independently-funded corporate engagements. The framework identifies 12 strategies across the value chain, as well as practices and monetization models to address critical environmental and social challenges, build more resilient organizations, and drive financial value. 

 

By now most companies have committed to sustainability efforts—and yet many CFOs still see those efforts as a cost rather than a source of value. That makes it hard to unlock the internal financing needed to scale them up. In this article, the director and a senior scholar at the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business demonstrate how the Return on Sustainability Investment (ROSI) analytic tool can help CFOs measure the financial returns on their sustainability activities. 

This article describes how CSB's Return on Sustainability Investment (ROSI) framework and  Harvard Business School's Impact-Weighted Accounting (IWA) can be used together to provide managers with a comprehensive assessment of financial, social, and environmental impact using the common language of currency.