In the world of sustainable best practices, good intentions are no longer good enough. Sustainable projects with funding must be monitored and held accountable to meet compliance and business needs. Problem is, most sustainable projects work from shoddy data sources, or in many cases, have no data to work from at all.
A very recent and unfortunate example of bad data hampering sustainability projects involves the state of New Jersey’s environmental officials shutting down the state’s river herring fishery. Are the herring fisherman of New Jersey abusing the river or overfishing? Hardly. According to the Associated Press, the decision was made in part because the state doesn’t have the necessary personnel or funding to collect the data needed to prove the fishery is sustainable. The restriction also bars recreational anglers from targeting the herring, and if they happen to catch one, they must throw it back immediately. Officials say New Jersey was one of several states that didn’t meet the deadline.
Brandon Muffley, who leads the state’s Bureau of Marine Fisheries, said, “We don’t have the data. We don’t know what river herring’s abundance is or what our fisheries are taking. We haven’t had the resources to do the work.”
Inadequate data gathering methods can lead to the “irrelevant data, unsubstantiated claims, gaps in data and inaccurate figures,” a Leeds University team reported in its examination of more than 4,000 corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports and company surveys.
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