Sustainability matters

To establish what the future might be in terms of sustainability, ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) recently asked 5000 of our students around the world about their hopes, fears and aspirations for sustainability and business in the next ten years.

The main focus of our questioning was: what will the world look like them, as financial professionals of the future? We wanted to get opinions of the finance professionals of the future about how the global sustainability trends will impact on businesses and the role of accountants in ten years time.

Asked what they saw as the key global trends that may impact business over the next ten years- their “top three” concerns were decline in natural resources; reputation rise and instability in the finance markets.

They also overwhelmingly believed that accounting professionals would need to provide businesses with more decision –making insight; that sustainability issues would be more prominent, that the environment’s impact on organisations will be a bigger focus for finance and accountancy professionals and that sustainability considerations will impact on every day working life.

Ominously only 34 percent thought the world would be a better place to live in.

Nearly 90 percent saw finance and accounting professionals becoming more involved in integrating sustainability issues into business in future

Our research also showed that finance and accounting professionals will need to provide businesses with more decision-making insight than now, such as forecasting and providing insights on more of what might happen in the future, rather than recording what has happened.

So how can accountants manage these future challenges? ACCA’s policy paper, Sustainability Matters, said that the global accountancy profession has an important role in making organisations more responsible and accountable in the pursuit of sustainable development.

From sustainability reporting to integrated reporting; the assurance of non-financial reporting and disclosure; climate change; natural capital and the green economy – accountants are central to making the sustainable equation add up and make sense.

Accountants’ professional skills in developing metrics, information systems, reporting and designing economic instruments, among other business attributes, will help make economies greener, companies more accountable, and achieve global and national measures that look beyond economic output to factor in non-traditional measures, such as human well-being and natural capital.

The bottom line is that the finance professionals of 2024 will have more challenges ahead of them than now, with research from the UN and the OECD telling us that climate change will have an impact on business. The OECD’s Environmental Outlook 2050 “The Consequences of Inaction” (2012) said that: “Climate change presents a global systemic risk to society. It threatens the basic elements of life for all people: access to water, food production, health, use of land, and physical and natural capital.”

We believe that the young accountants of today will go on to develop the skills, abilities and knowledge to shape and change the future; many are already doing so. Our hope is that by 2024, the accountancy professional, wherever that person may be working, will be creating a brave new world with sustainability integral to it.