Abstract
We propose addressing an organization’s adoption of an environmental certification as a multicriteria problem considering environmental sustainability as well as economic and strategic aspects. Our methodological approach uses the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which we use in an empirical application to analyze the adoption decision of several Costa Rican firms and institutions. Firstly, we select a set of economic, strategic, and environmental criteria that seem relevant for the organization’s direction. We select these criteria according to our literature review and a series of face-to-face interviews with scholars and companies’ managers. As an environmental certification, we focus on Carbon Neutral (CN), which is a domestic certification aimed at reducing or offsetting carbon emissions. For the sake of comparison, we also consider ISO 14001, which is a well-known international standard aimed at compliance with environmental norms. We conduct the AHP analysis using the answers given by 24 companies and institutions, which in aggregate terms, give CN a higher score than ISO 14001. This result is mainly due to the fact that CN ranks above ISO 14001 when attending to environmental sustainability, although ISO 14001 tends to be preferred in economic and strategic terms.
Highlights
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development [1] established 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a roadmap to guarantee a more sustainable future and overcome some of the most urgent challenges of mankind
An auditing agency must verify both the inventories and the veracity of the reduction and offset strategies. All this information is corroborated by the Climate Change Department of the Costa Rican Government, which gives to the companies the “Carbon Neutral Declaration or Certification” [30,31]
Given the limited number of respondents and the possible interactions among different effects, these results should be taken with care, but they provide us with useful hints for future developments. Both environmental sustainability and economic-strategic aspects appear to be important for Costa Rican organizations when adopting an environmental certification
Summary
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development [1] established 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a roadmap to guarantee a more sustainable future and overcome some of the most urgent challenges of mankind. By shifting from conventional, polluting patterns to cleaner and more sustainable ones, companies can play a crucial role to achieve the SDGs, especially some of them such as providing affordable and clean energy (SDG 7), decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns (SDG 12) and fighting climate change and its impacts (SDG 13); see e.g., [3,4,5]. This change in companies’ policies can involve adopting some voluntary environmental certification (VEC) or program (VEP).
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