Who will encounter accounting for nature?
A new Copernican trauma looms, wherein we find ourselves standing upon a ruined planet, not smart enough to save ourselves and no longer by any stretch of the imagination the smartest living things around. Our very survival depends upon our ability to make a new compact with the more-than-human world, one which views the intelligence, the innate being, of all things — animal, vegetable and machine — not as another indication of our own superiority, but as an intimation of our ultimate interdependence, and as an urgent call to humility and care. James Bridle 104 Finance professionals
The accounting for nature agenda is one that is highly dynamic. Consequently, the development and maintenance of knowledge and skills for the finance professional needs to be flexible and appropriate, as knowledge and skills will differ greatly across different sectors and over time. This is best described in terms of different shades of green.
Where deep, specialised knowledge about a biodiversity issue, is represented by the darkest shade of green (required by a few experts). For instance, when an entity or industry sector is dependent on a keystone species, there will be a need to engage externally with scientists, biologists, biodiversity experts, the farming community, and regulators to have technical conversations. By asking the right questions, and investigating the logic, and verifying the technical findings, the finance professional becomes the bridge back into the organisation. In turn, the finance function can translate natural capital results in a familiar business language.
The shades of green get lighter as you expand outwards to the lightest green. This represents a high-level, broad understanding and awareness of nature issues that will enable a finance professional to support mainstream decision-making across an organisation, with clients and the wider economy.
Every finance professional needs to develop their shade of green and be able to apply knowledge and understanding of the biodiversity issues, to the extent appropriate for their role, function, organisation, or client interaction. As the accounting for nature agenda evolves, so too must a finance professionals’ shade of green knowledge and skills. This skills evolution should be facilitated by lifelong learning and CPE/CPD (Continuing Professional Education/Development).
Finance functions
Author, James Vincent, highlights, ‘The world as we know it today is ruled by equivalence; by a desire to reduce everything to number and make dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities.’ 105
The struggle for finance functions is how to tell their organisations’ nature value stories. Numbers behind any accounting for nature system and nature positive targets are always just an approximation or a metaphor. The issues covered, can if reduced to a cost or a number lose the true meaning of the potential risk or opportunity. This can be difficult for finance functions that see numbers as precise solutions, very much in a black-and-white context.
Jeanette Winterson, author, also has a timely remind for finance functions, ‘Accounting is more than numbers; accounting is accountability. This time, the real costs of progress have to be faced and factored in.’ 106
James Bridle raises the issues of having fit for purpose technology,
‘If our inability to tell meaningful, actionable stories about our changing planet is part of the problem, then we need to rethink the tools we use to make culture itself. Technology can be part of this communal, sense-making process. In order for this to happen, we need to stop using it as a way to constrain time and enforce our narrow perspective, and instead deploy it to widen our vision and expand the scope of our attention’108 James Bridle As part of the accounting for nature journey, finance functions will need to review how their digital systems can support telling their biodiversity stories and chart progress to becoming nature-positive.
Organisations
Sir David Attenborough believes there is a great opportunity,
The advent of the Anthropocene could yet mark the beginning of a new and sustainable relationship between ourselves and with the planet. It could be a time in which we learn how to work with nature rather than against it, a time in which there would no longer be any great distinction between the natural and the managed, for we would become the attentive stewards of the entire Earth, calling upon nature's extraordinary resilience to help us bring its biodiversity back from the brink.109 Sir David Attenborough Once an organisation has started its nature positive journey, the nature mindset must be built into its culture. The strategic purpose provides the foundation for why an organisation exists. The nature positive transition plan needs to become part of the DNA of their purpose and built into their strategic direction.
It is important to understand that an organisation’s strategic transparency on nature is not then taken at face value. Stakeholders now have access to other sources of data and information to compare against an organisation’s strategy.
As highlighted in the introduction, the accounting for nature question exhibits the characteristics of a wicked problem. Given the complexity of the task ahead, organisations will need to engage and advocate widely. This means reaching out and having inter- and multidisciplinary conversations that draw on governments, local communities, regulators, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), supply chain partners, and industry competitors.
