A stochastic approach for sustainability analysis under the green economics paradigm

Sustainability is an increasingly important factor in today's globally competitive environment. How sustainability features are prioritized in terms of relevance and significance is a function of many factors, including variations in types of business, operational conditions, history and other characteristics particular to a company. The purpose of this paper is to propose a stochastic model that explicitly addresses the potential barriers and enablers to sustainability in order to measure and assess the sustainability level of a company. Given that the potential barriers and enablers to sustainability are context dependent, the stochastic model developed in this paper assumes that a variable characterization of sustainability functions can describe a realistic analytical model for a company's sustainability behavior. By adopting the strong sustainability perspective, a case scenario is used to demonstrate the application of the proposed model in a major Canadian electric utility. By providing relatively simple and informative measurement, the proposed sustainability model can be used as a practical and effective tool to assess the sustainability level of any company under consideration and to evaluate sustainability fluctuation of the company over time.