Groundbreaking project helps small businesses everywhere report their environmental impact
13th May 2024
An innovative framework produced by OUI-supported social venture Divine Ox will help small businesses around the world benchmark, measure and report their environmental impact. Deployed by the leading environmental reporting nonprofit CDP (formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project), the framework will help fill the huge gaps in environmental impact data among micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs).
The world’s 350 million MSMEs generate an estimated 60% of global GDP – but their social and environmental impact is largely unknown. Divine Ox’s mission is to shine a light on this impact, allowing smaller businesses to improve their transparency, identify where they can contribute to climate mitigation and social justice efforts, showcase their positive work, and gain access to data-reliant commercial opportunities.
“MSMEs are the backbone of the global economy,” says Divine Ox co-founder Arnab Dutt, a specialist in social value and impact. “But despite being key parts of the supply chain for governments and large corporations, they are data-invisible. A major cosmetics company, for example, would have no idea about the environmental or social impact of the small family farm that provides tropical fruit for its products. All industries view their supply chains as a potential risk – but, at the same time, small businesses increasingly need to demonstrate their credentials in order to gain access to public sector contracts.”
To help address this reporting gap, Divine Ox is working with CDP on a new questionnaire that will allow MSMEs to provide valuable – and, until now, uncollected – environmental data. The first iteration of the questionnaire will be released worldwide this year, and it will be refined over time to be as accessible and as effective as possible. The methodology could then be adapted for other areas of reporting, such as social justice, community impact or diversity. “It’s really important,” says Arnab, “that questionnaires like this are written in language MSMEs can understand, and that they ask for information MSMEs can easily provide. It might be information about their utility bills, waste, sales or materials. We can’t extract all the data, but if we can identify ten simple things that give us 80% of the picture, that will be incredibly useful.”
Arnab, who co-founded Divine Ox a year ago alongside Mark Mann and Campbell McDonald, adds: “This can look like a data challenge, but it’s actually more of a social science, political and behavioural challenge. It’s about the cultural change needed to incentivise businesses to be more transparent and to realise that everyone needs to play their part in addressing climate and social justice. We need to do that if we’re to have a chance of achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals or developing a circular, regenerative economy.”
Incentivising and breaking down barriers to MSME impact reporting is a key strand of Divine Ox’s work, alongside the creation of metrics and frameworks – like the CDP questionnaire – to help partner organisations address those gaps. The company is also developing predictive impact models to counteract the current lack of data that hampers collective reporting efforts. In another recent project, Divine Ox worked with a network of 40 higher education institutions to help them demonstrate the impact and predicted impact of commercial spinouts based on IP from social sciences, arts and humanities departments.
Divine Ox is keen to hear from individuals or groups across the University who are interested in working together – either to assess their own social and environmental impact or to collaborate on new research projects. Contact: info@divineox.org
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