Evaluation of CSR Project from the Economic, Environmental and Social Performances Monitoring by Using the Case Study of Renewable Energy for a Community Project in Thailand

Abstract

Recently, sustainable development becomes a major global issue for the mankind. In order to meet this criteria, main objectives that composed of three aspects which are environment, economic, and social has to be completely met. Practically, the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is one of a useful tools that can promote the sustainable development effectively in which decent amount of renown companies in Thailand operate and find it quite successful for some degrees. For this study, the goal was to investigate the current situation of renewable energy for a community project in Thailand. The biogas production from swine farms was used as the representative case study to evaluate the economic, environmental and social performance. The key performance indicators (KPI) were used which based on the ISO 2600:2010. The study revealed that the project provided the returns rate on the investment to the public in the form of "Social return on investment" (SROI) to be 6.59 which indicated that the CSR project is worth for the investment. In addition, the net present value (NPV) could also promote the benefits in term of economic for about 3,038,137 THB per year. For the environmental perspective, the biogas from swine farm can cause the reduction in energy/fuel consumption along with the utilization of treated waste sludge as a fertilizer which also gain the carbon credits from GHG emission mitigation. As for the social perspective, the benefit gains were in the form of monetary along with the increasing of employment rate which resulted from the CSR biogas production projects were used to calculate for the economic perspective as the direct economic value which accounted for over 389,149 THB per year. The results of this study can be a useful case study for project owners or related sectors to make the improvement and moving toward the sustainable development later on.