Attempting to eliminate the gap between the sustainability and finance functions within an organisation is the aim of people such as Roger Adams, executive director of policy at the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and chairman of the Global Reporting Initiative's technical advisory committee.
'Sustainability is a key issue for many organisations and yet it's inadequately represented at board level,' London-based Adams said. 'We want to see chief financial officers and finance directors placing more emphasis on the strategic concerns brought about by issues such as climate change that will become pressing issues for directors and boards.
'Finance directors are well placed to lead the debate about the strategic impact of these issues on organisations. From the internal perspective, accountants need to play a larger role and drive the disclosure of key sustainability issues through the annual report and financial statements.'
To make the finance function responsible for sustainability reporting, Adams advised giving it ownership of the process. He cited the example of Britain's Crown Estate, which manages the Crown's property and whose finance director is responsible for sustainability reporting.
'In financial reporting, there's a rigour to data collection and data integrity. One of the big criticisms of sustainability reporting has been its lack of data rigour and comparability from sector to sector or year to year within the same organisation. Data rigour is something that the accounting function treats as an everyday competence,' he said.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales is also spearheading better sustainability reporting. Its Sustainable Business initiative argues that trusted and properly targeted information is vital to sustainability, sustainable development and sustainable business.
'Sustainable systems - both organisms in the natural world or organisations in society - learn, adapt, improve and succeed by processing information. They need to be able to modify their behaviour on the basis of this information,' the institute said in its initial report.