County Sustainability Reporting Journey

The Challenge

A county in California was seeking to create organizational sustainability across its departments. Its leadership asked for assistance in identifying meaningful KPIs that would demonstrate and track progress toward their Sustainability Master Plan (SMP) goals. Faced with increasing public scrutiny and reporting requirements, and lacking sufficient resources and tracking systems, the County struggled to gather data across internal departments and demonstrate its progress.

Our Solution

With 30+ years’ integrated experience in sustainability consulting, data management, and software, ADEC ESG Solutions seamlessly worked with 20 County departments, facilitating interviews to better understand each department’s vision, goals, and targets. Through these meetings ADEC ESG, together with the County, identified the preliminary KPIs that would be tracked, based on data that was readily available, quantifiable, and relevant to the identified SMP goals and targets.

Our ESG experts streamlined the data collection process, developing data collection templates to organize information. The County’s data was then imported into user-friendly, web-based dashboards to showcase progress towards SMP goals, targets, and strategies in real-time through our customized sustainability software. These dashboards showcase the year-over-year progress that the County is making towards their identified KPIs.

ADEC ESG also developed automated systems to reduce the time and cost of annual data collection. This information was published on the County’s SMP website to allow for public visibility, engagement, and interaction with the County’s sustainability progress. With the data collection process defined, the County actively uses its dashboards to improve operational processes and meet their target goals, saving tremendous departmental time and resources.

Results and Deliverables

• Created dashboards for 60 targets to track the County’s progress toward SMP goals
• Defined KPIs across 17 different county departments and agencies
• Identified a 50% reduction in per capital disposal rate within the County between FY2019 – FY2020
• Identified that 44% of a three-year tree-planting target had been achieved by the county
• Optimized internal resource use, operational efficiency, and reduced costs
• Increased stakeholder engagement
• Informed decision-making progress
• Improved sustainability reporting score and status