What is the purpose of a historical benchmark in creating a sustainability plan for an organization? They are an issue of transparency with employees and the public so that a company can be held accountable by critics if it fails to live up to its promises. They provide a way of understanding how climate change has impacted an organization in the past and how it likely will do so in the future. They tell an organization where their practices are most in need of improvement and provide a way of measuring if progress has been made in the future. They create goals for an organization and inform them how to best form their "green team" on sustainability