Performing Actionable Evaluations of Sustainability Investments

Businesses are rapidly pursuing investments in sustainable technologies to meet their climate goals, but performing actionable evaluations of technologies is difficult, especially in decentralized businesses. Actionable evaluations have high accuracy, high precision, and address uncertainty. Sustain...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Hopkins, Jacob
Other Authors: Welsch, Roy
Format: Thesis
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2023
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151625
Description
Summary:Businesses are rapidly pursuing investments in sustainable technologies to meet their climate goals, but performing actionable evaluations of technologies is difficult, especially in decentralized businesses. Actionable evaluations have high accuracy, high precision, and address uncertainty. Sustainable technologies are not well characterized and their expected performance is uncertain. For numerous reasons, approaches used in industry do not currently address these concerns. This research investigated tools to improve accuracy and precision and proposes a methodology to address uncertainty. The methodology includes a Monte-Carlo simulation tool and a method to assess data quality that address the concerns in traditional approaches. We believe this methodology can help decentralized businesses perform more actionable evaluations of sustainable technologies.