The Environmental Return on Sustainability Systems

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:The paper provides a replicable method for monetizing ecological footprint into financial metrics, opening avenues for empirical testing across sectors.

🏢実務担当者:Corporate sustainability and finance teams can adopt the EROS metric to evaluate green ICT/infrastructure investments and communicate environmental value in financial terms.

This research develops a quantitative framework that integrates environmental sustainability into financial investment decision-making for ICT and infrastructure systems. While sustainability policies, ESG reporting and carbon accounting have become standard in modern enterprises, they remain weakly connected to the capital allocation mechanisms that determine real investment outcomes. Environmental impacts are typically expressed in physical units such as CO₂ emissions, energy consumption, or land use, but these indicators are not directly compatible with financial metrics such as return on investment, net present value, or total cost of ownership. As a result, environmentally superior system designs are frequently rejected because their benefits cannot be evaluated within conventional economic decision models. To address this structural disconnect, the research introduces a formal decision-support model that treats environmental impact as a first-class economic variable. The core of the framework is a conversion mechanism that translates ecological footprint, measured in global hectares (gha), into monetary value expressed in euros. Global hectares capture the biologically productive land area required to sustain a system’s resource use and emissions across its full life cycle. By monetizing this footprint through ecosystem service valuation, carbon cost equivalence, and long-term externality pricing, the model makes environmental impact directly comparable to financial costs and benefits. This environmental valuation is embedded into standard financial analysis tools, including total cost of ownership, net present value, break-even analysis, and return on investment. The resulting composite indicator, termed Environmental Return on Sustainability (EROS), measures how much ecological and financial value a sustainability-optimized system produces relative to its investment cost. This allows green system architectures and conventional high-emission alternatives to be evaluated on a single, coherent quantitative scale. When applied to ICT and infrastructure scenarios, the model demonstrates that systems optimized for energy efficiency, virtualization, and reduced material intensity consistently generate significantly lower ecological footprints over their operational lifetime. When these reductions are converted into monetary terms, sustainability-focused architectures reach break-even earlier than conventional systems in medium-term investment horizons, typically between three and seven years. In multiple simulated scenarios, environmentally optimized systems outperform high-emission designs not only in environmental terms but also in overall economic performance once external environmental costs are internalized. The key scientific contribution of this research is the establishment of a unified environmental–economic valuation framework that enables formal optimization rather than descriptive reporting. Unlike traditional ESG or carbon accounting approaches, the model produces financially interpretable outputs that integrate directly into corporate finance and capital budgeting processes. Sustainability is therefore no longer treated as a regulatory constraint or reputational factor, but as an optimizable investment parameter. From a practical and policy perspective, the framework provides enterprises, public institutions, and regulators with a tool to evaluate green investments using defensible financial metrics, justify sustainability expenditures in capital allocation decisions, and design incentive schemes based on real environmental return on investment rather than abstract ESG scores. Overall, the research demonstrates that sustainability can be transformed from a qualitative policy goal into a quantitative investment strategy that simultaneously improves ecological and economic performance.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6054614first seen 2026-05-15 17:29:33