Abstract
Sustainable development (SD) has become a critical issue due to growing concern about environmental problems in recent years and firms are obliged to justify their presence in society more than ever before. In this context, business planning, monitoring, evaluation, and communication with customers and wide variety of stakeholders from sustainability perspective are indispensable as well as those from economic perspective. Although growing number of tools for SD have been proposed, it is often difficult to clarify which business activities actually contribute to (or violate) SD due to high complexity of environmental and economical system of our society. In order to handle this complexity in a systematical manner, this paper proposes a method for collecting and describing various cause-effect chains from existing business cases, identifies patterns among them based on causal-loop diagram, and formulate them into a pattern library so that businesses can easily identify hot-spots in their activities by relating them with cause-effect patterns provided by a pattern library.
