Reporting software giant SAS has this week released a major new application designed to help firms measure and manage a wide range of environmental metrics and model how corporate decisions will have an impact on their carbon footprint.

The company said SAS for Sustainability Management will deploy the same functions featured in many of its tools for reporting and analysing financial metrics, providing executives with a single dashboard for assessing and analysing the effectiveness of their CSR and environmental strategies.

"Today many firms are using Excel spreadsheets to keep track of their environmental metrics," observed Alyssa Farrell, marketing manager for sustainability solutions at the company. "This gives execs one tool to help them assess how environmental strategies are working and model which approaches will prove most successful."

She said the metrics supported by the new suite are based on standards developed by the Global Reporting Initiative CSR governance group and cover about 100 different areas, including carbon emissions, water use and HR indicators such as employee turnover.

The tool also has modelling functions designed to allow firms to undertake " what if" scenario planning that allows executives to predict the impact that managerial decisions will have on carbon emissions. "The aim is to allow the user to model carbon in the same way they can model the cost impact of a project," explained Farrell.

She admitted that an absence of universal carbon-reporting standards and the failure of many firms, particularly within larger organisations' supply chains, to keep emission data meant that the suite would need to be combined with efforts to ensure that the data collected is accurate and comprehensive. But she added that the dashboard provides executives with the ability to drill down through the various layers of data to gauge its accuracy.

"At this time when we still lack clear standards, the most important thing is that there is complete transparency [in the reporting of carbon data]," said Farrell. "You need to be very clear on the assumptions that are used in any calculations."

The launch comes as the Business Application Software Developers Association (BASDA) announced that it has created a new group designed to accelerate work across the software industry on tools capable of measuring, accounting for and budgeting carbon emissions.