OVERVIEW
MANAGEMENT
PERFORMANCE
POSSIBILITIES
CAPITALS
ACTIVITIES
ACTORS
BURGESS
|
MANAGEMENT METRICS
NATURAL CAPITAL REPORTING What-natural-capital-disclosure-for-IR? A 62 page PDF from 2014 This presentation address the Natural Capital dimension or integrated reporting quite well ... now e need to pull together the social accounting and the economic accounting in the same framework as we have natural capital accounting. All of my work with 'development accounting ' since the 1980s was based on the need to embrace social and environmental impacts as much as we addressed the economic impacts. I was able to use a FoxPro database system to do this in a rather modest manner that was quite useful. Sadly Bill Gates and Microsoft put an end to that when they purchased FoxPro and merged it into their proprietary MS framework ... and that effectively ended my involvement with databases and development data. Am I bitter? Yes ... but I try not to let that get in the way of my personal progress!!!!!!! This paper ... What Natural Capital Disclosure for Integrated Reporting ... is a step in the right direction, but, I would argue not enough. It remeins the 'little brother' in the ongoing corporate reporting hierarchy and that is not good enough. Worse, it only adds in Natural Capital to supplement corporate financial reporting leaving out the massive and key dimension of Social Capital. During my period in my career when I was a corporate CFO and in the center of 'management', I tried to make maximum use of the 'easy data' that was flowing round the organization. Very early in my career (late 60s early 70s) I was involved a bit in the development of something that was named 'responsibility accounting. What this tried to do was to make sure that a real person was responsible for the numbers being reported whether it was in connection with the cost of a single part, or the total for a department, or the company as a whole ... so every piece of paper coming out of the accounting department that related to performance has a person's name on it. Several fairly high profile Harvard Business School academics and students were engaged in this initiative and the company I was working with was a part of their 'trials'. I used various versions of this through all my career both in corporate work and also in the public sector around 'economic development' and 'humanitarian assistance'. Most people are rarely challenged to do their best and are allowed to coast along being average ... but with responsibility accounting there is a good amount of reward that justifies any risk that comes with constructive action. Peter Burgess | ||
|
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Business and government leaders from around the world are increasingly sounding the alarm about the need for effective management of business dependencies and impacts on ecosystems. As a consequence, inancial institutions have recently made a formal commitment to work towards integrating natural capital considerations into their decision-making processes, including helping improve the accounting and disclosure practices of reporting organisations. Though various frameworks and standards have been developed and implemented improve extra-inancial accountability to stakeholders, current ‘sustainability reporting’ falls short in providing the information needed for accurate investment decision-making. The recent releases of Integrated Reporting (IR) guidelines, notably by International Integrated Reporting Committee, have been presented as a signiicant step in the right direction by professionals and academics. This paper argues that a solid accounting foundation is required for these to be able to effectively incorporate the broader and longer term social and environmental consequences of corporate decision-making. To support this argument, this paper first provides a brief review of Natural Capital accounting methods and main reporting practices. Based on this analysis, the paper proposes the key principles and methodological foundations for an Integrated Financial – Natural Capital Accounting and Reporting Framework which can be used to fulfil the aspirations of IR guidelines. A theoretical case study involving selected natural capital accounts (GHG emissions, wood consumption, water footprint, habitat loss) illustrates the practical implications of such a framework over three years, by notably explaining: i) the integrated inancial – natural capital accounting journal entries, ii) the ensuing Integrated Financial – Natural Capital Statements of Position and Performance; and iii) how to calculate and disclose the natural capital biophysical and externality intensity of financial accounts. In doing so, this Framework provides the concrete foundation for building up a time and space distributed “catalogue” of natural capital dependency and impact information aligned with inancial information recorded by companies, hence providing the integrated accounting application for other environmental accounting standards and guidelines, such as the Water Footprint and GHG Footprint Standards and potentially the forthcoming Natural Capital Protocol. It can hence be used to improve business decision-making, drive sustainable organisational changes and improve natural capital accountability. March 21st, 2023 ... THIS NEEDS A LOT MORE WORK IS THERE A SIMILAR REPORT / PDF ABOUT SOCIAL CAPITAL ???? THIS CAN BE THE FOUNDATION FOR THE THIRD LEG OF THE TVM FRAMEWORK ??????
| The text being discussed is available at | and |