How to avoid any trivialization, when not mere "washing" operations? How to make the channel of correct communication and the binary of rigor in the punctual and constant assessment of sustainability results proceed in parallel? We talked about it with one of the speakers who attended the VI annual event of the Global Thinking Foundation: Professor Luigi Corvo, co-founder of the digital platform, Open Impact, born as a spin off of the University of Rome Tor Vergata with the aim of collecting and making accessible the entire set of data, information and knowledge already generated by collective intelligence with projects related to sustainability, but not exploited.
Impact and Sustainability these are the terms that are most insistently used in trying to outline the features of a 'possible' economy and which are most frequently evoked to underline the need for a transition which, before being digital and environmental, must be cultural. However, the 'casual' use of these concepts carries the risk of debasing their revolutionary significance and reducing their transformative potential, compressing them and confining them within the sphere of marketing: but this is not their natural home. On the contrary, they require an investment in political and strategic intentionality.
A rich database, the one developed by Open Impact, indeed a real buried treasure, which would allow us to orient ourselves in the world of sustainability with evidence and metrics capable of measuring the value produced, not only in financial terms, but also in terms of size social and environmental.
Professor Luigi Corvo, what does Open Impact propose?
“Our goal is to remove the technical barriers to enable decision-makers to make increasingly informed choices towards the transition to a new world, which we imagine as the 'home' of the Next Generation, or that place where value invests a wider and deeper dimension than that of profit. The last century, characterized by an extractive capitalism, has declined the value in the financial sense only. Recalling a beautiful poem by Erri de Luca, 'I consider value', we would like to contribute to a new meaning of what society considers value”
How are you going to do it?
“By leveraging all available knowledge: we are certainly not the first, nor the only ones, interested in measuring social and environmental impacts, quite the contrary. There is a large community engaged in producing data and publishing reports. All of this, however, is largely neglected today, preferring to follow two poorly effective paths: to build, from time to time, measurement models, or to refer to top-down taxonomies tending to standardize the processes to the point of emptying them of the content, determining an effect compiling rather than transformative. When sustainability translates into procedure it is like when flour becomes 00"
In other words, it loses its "nutritional" value for the development of the ecosystem. All right, but How can Open Impact assessments ignore the constraints of the most accredited taxonomies?
“By building a learning environment where data gleaned from other assessments facilitates and accelerates a cross-learning process. In other words, data learns from data and human intelligence integrates with artificial intelligence to optimize any knowledge, wherever in the world it was produced. Taxonomies, therefore, no longer represent a constraint to be fulfilled, but a reference to aim for, to bring together the evidence collected from below in comparison clusters recognizable by policy makers and investors. Think of the SDGs, the EU Taxonomy and the ESG criteria: these taxonomies are very useful, if understood in a circular process, in which ascending and descending flows of data are able to bring ever greater evidence from the top of the decision-making places to the territory in which they are experienced innovations and vice versa”
How does all of this relate to finance and investing?
“This is a key step in our approach. The data show us that the social and environmental value are not to be considered merely theoretical, as demonstrated by the fact that the financial impact given off by positive social and environmental changes is almost always recognisable”.
Some examples?
“Projects that manage to measure the impact in terms of greater social inclusion cause significant financial effects in terms of structural reduction of public spending, as well as the reduction of CO emissions2 determines savings on the cost of the energy bill and on other expenditure fronts. An intelligent platform is able to link the impacts to its financial effects and to enhance the social and environmental return of an investment on a micro, meso and macro scale"
Could it therefore also be useful as a working method for directing and monitoring the investments envisaged by the PNRR?
"Certain. We have already started a trial of the use of the impact database to support the investment intentions made explicit by the PNRR: we clearly have the unrepeatable opportunity to make an evolution in the way we conceive investment processes and build public-private relations. The PNRR, as well as the funds linked to EU 21-27 programming, must not only provide for ex post social and/or environmental impact assessments, but should be directed to projects capable of expressing, and making explicit, the intentions of the expected impact. Sustainability, therefore, does not pertain to mere verification, but to the strategic thinking of a desirable future: an inclusive, fair and compatible socio-economic ecosystem with the natural one. Today, this perspective, through the alliance between digital and social innovation, is achievable"
From his words, an underlying optimism shines through. Is that so?
“The human species has already demonstrated throughout history that it succeeds in challenges as far as possible. My optimism comes from the continuous perception of 'riches of the possible', which, in the words of Andre Gorz, I see as clearly prevailing over the 'misery of the present"
Then it is not about optimism, but more likely to regain the faculty of imagination
"Exact. I would speak of the need to cultivate a transformative realism not imprisoned in seemingly natural constraints but, in reality, the result of social constructs. And social constructs, such as the concept of profit, are semantic fields that can be re-meaning through emerging new patterns. This company has a very fascinating historical task: to evolve the signals that guide market conversations, to embrace human complexity, far beyond abstract simplification of homo aeconomicus, whose action in social reality is partial and dictated by individual utility.
