A planetary well-being accounting system for organizations

Abstract

Transformative changes in the operations of humankind are needed to support the transition towards planetary well-being. We humans organize our everyday lives through organizations. We argue that to understand the role of organizations and to facilitate the transition towards planetary well-being, we need a value-transforming integration of financial and environmental accounting and reporting. We find such integration critical to ensuring that the senior executives of organizations pay attention, and to ensuring that environmental impacts begin to influence the management decisions of the organizations. In this chapter we discuss how and why environmental accounting can and should be integrated with financial accounting, which is the dominant information system supporting decision-making in organizations. We explain how environmental impacts can be identified and quantified by utilizing financial accounts and environmentally extended input-output databases. We present an integrated financial-environmental impact statement as an alternative to the current separated reports of financial and environmental accounts. Finally, we conclude that the integration of financial and environmental accounting should be mandatory for all organizations with financial disclosure obligations and that the environmental impacts should be made visible by introducing mandatory biodiversity offsetting schemes, new environmental protection taxes, or some other instruments that have the potential to transform the value of financial accounts.