Editing Triple bottom line (section)

==Supporting arguments==
{{more citations needed section|date=April 2014}}
The following business-based arguments support the concept of TBL:

*Reaching untapped market potential: TBL companies can find financially profitable niches which were missed when money alone was the driving factor. Examples include:

# Adding [[ecotourism]] or [[geotourism]] to an already rich tourism market such as the [[Dominican Republic]]
# Developing profitable methods to assist existing NGOs with their missions such as fundraising, reaching clients, or creating networking opportunities with multiple NGOs
# Providing products or services which benefit underserved populations and/or the environment which are also financially profitable.

*Adapting to new business sectors: While the number of [[social enterprises]] is growing,<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/the-peoples-business|title=The People's Business 2013|work=Social Enterprise UK|access-date=July 15, 2015|language=en}}</ref> and with the entry of the [[B Corporation|B Corp movement]],<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogertrapp/2015/03/29/business-leaders-urged-to-find-a-purpose-in-life/|title=Business Leaders Urged To Find A Purpose In Life|date=2015|website=Forbes|last1=Trapp|first1=Roger|access-date=26 August 2015}}</ref> there is more demand from consumers and investors for an accounting for social and environmental impact.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/About-Deloitte/gx-wef-2015-millennial-survey-executivesummary.pdf|title=Mind the gaps. The 2015 Deloitte Millennial survey|date=2015|website=Deloitt|access-date=15 July 2015}}</ref>  For example, [[Fair trade|Fair Trade]] and Ethical Trade companies require ethical and sustainable practices from all of their suppliers and service providers.

Government [[fiscal policies]] usually claim to be concerned with identifying social and natural deficits on a less formal basis. However, such choices may be guided more by [[ideology]] than by [[economics]]. The primary benefit of embedding one approach to measurement of these deficits would be first to direct [[monetary policy]] to reduce them, and eventually achieve a global [[monetary reform]] by which they could be systematically and globally reduced in some uniform way.

The argument is that the [[Earth]]'s [[carrying capacity]] is at risk, and that in order to avoid catastrophic breakdown of [[climate]] or [[ecosystem]]s, there is need for comprehensive reform of [[Global financial system|global financial institutions]] similar in scale to what was undertaken at the [[Bretton Woods Conference]] in 1944.

With the emergence of an externally consistent [[green economics]] and agreement on definitions of potentially contentious terms such as [[full-cost accounting]], [[natural capital]] and [[social capital]], the prospect of formal metrics for ecological and social loss or risk has grown less remote since the 1990s.{{Citation needed|date=August 2015}}

In the [[United Kingdom]] in particular, the London Health Observatory has undertaken a formal programme to address social deficits via a fuller understanding of what "social capital" is, how it functions in a real [[community]] (that being the [[City of London]]), and how losses of it tend to require both [[financial capital]] and significant political and social attention from [[Volunteering|volunteer]]s and professionals to help resolve.  The data they rely on is extensive, building on decades of statistics of the [[Greater London Council]] since [[World War II]].  Similar studies have been undertaken in [[North America]].

Studies of the [[value of Earth]] have tried to determine what might constitute an ecological or natural life deficit. The [[Kyoto Protocol]] relies on some measures of this sort, and actually relies on some [[value of life]] calculations that, among other things, are explicit about the ratio of the price of a human life between developed and developing nations (about 15 to 1). While the motive of this number was to simply assign responsibility for a cleanup, such stark honesty opens not just an economic but political door to some kind of negotiation &mdash; presumably to reduce that ratio in time to something seen as more equitable. As it is, people in developed nations can be said to benefit 15 times more from [[ecological devastation]] than in developing nations, in pure financial terms. According to the [[Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change|IPCC]], they are thus obliged to pay 15 times more per life to avoid a loss of each such life to [[climate change]] &mdash; the [[Kyoto Protocol]] seeks to implement exactly this formula, and is therefore sometimes cited as a first step towards getting nations to accept formal [[legal liability|liability]] for damage inflicted on ecosystems shared globally.

Advocacy for triple bottom line reforms is common in [[Green Parties]]. Some of the measures undertaken in the [[European Union]] towards the [[Euro]] currency integration standardize the reporting of ecological and social losses in such a way as to seem to endorse in principle the notion of unified accounts, or [[unit of account]], for these deficits.

To address financial bottom line profitability concerns, some argue that focusing on the TBL will indeed increase profit for the shareholders in the long run. In practice, [[John Mackey (businessman)|John Mackey]], CEO of [[Whole Foods Market|Whole Foods]], uses Whole Foods' Community Giving Days as an example. On days when Whole Foods donates 5% of their sales to charity, this action benefits the community, creates goodwill with customers, and energizes employees, which may lead to increased, sustainable profitability in the long-run.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://fortune.com/2015/08/20/whole-foods-john-mackey/|title=John Mackey: The conscious capitalist}}</ref>

Furthermore, planning a sustainability strategy with the triple bottom line in mind could save companies a lot of money if a disaster were to strike. For example, when [[BP]] spilled "two hundred million gallons of oil in the [[Gulf of Mexico]]", it cost the company "billions". This company focused mostly on the financial and economic costs of this disaster, instead of the company’s environmental bottom line, furthering damage to the company and its reputation.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Szekely |first1=Francisco |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1pc5g1x |title=The Beyond the Triple Bottom Line: Eight Steps toward a Sustainable Business Model |last2=Dossa |first2=Zahir |last3=Hollender |first3=Jeffrey |date=2017 |publisher=[[MIT Press]]|jstor=j.ctt1pc5g1x |isbn=978-0-262-03599-6}}</ref>