ID: 1769
Presenting Author: Mahima Sukhdev
Session: 601 - Renewing renewables’ impact assessments: emerging practices towards value creation
Status: pending
Impact accounting reframes how we value the energy transition, quantifying harms avoided and benefits delivered to reveal renewables’ true contributions to resilience, livelihoods, and health.
Mahima Sukhdev - Chief Growth Officer participating in the Renewing Renewables' Impact Assessments panel.
The clean energy transition is dependent on how effectively we understand, measure, and manage its environmental and social consequences. Traditional impact assessments have focused on minimising harm, yet the transition’s real potential lies in communicating effectively on the net economic value it creates for communities and broader society.
Impact accounting brings this potential into focus by combining science-based data, valuation methods, and spatial context to quantify both the negative impacts avoided and the benefits delivered by renewable projects, all in economic terms to make it tangible.
By reframing what we value and how we value, we can reveal where renewables contribute most to resilience, livelihoods, and ecosystem health, while also identifying areas of risk and trade-off.
In doing so, impact accounting strengthens credibility, builds social licence, and enables a more transparent and regenerative energy system grounded in measurable value creation.
Mahima Sukhdev leads global growth and partnerships for GIST Impact, working with the world's leading companies and investors to measure and quantify their real-world environmental and social impacts.