A4S publishes four sustainability guides for accounting and finance

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10 Mar 2015

The Prince of Wales' Accounting for Sustainability project (A4S) has published four guides to help the finance and accounting community address the issues of integrating sustainability into their business processes and decisions.

The guides have been developed by the A4S Chief Financial Officer Leadership Network, which was launched in December 2013. The Network brings together a select group of leading CFOs from large European businesses seeking to embed the management of environmental and social issues into business processes and strategy. Therefore, each guide is supported by case studies from Network members to demonstrate practical applications of the approaches and techniques set out in the guides. The guides are:

  • Natural and social capital accounting. This guide explains the key terms of natural and social capital accounting, the benefits of broadening accounting frameworks, and the challenges of converting natural and social capital impacts and dependencies into financial figures.
  • Enhancing investor engagement. This guide is intended to assist with investor relations and covers ideas such as moving away from quarterly reporting of financial results and instead incorporating sustainability information into investor presentations.
  • Managing future uncertainty. This guide offers an introduction to integrating risks resulting from macro sustainability trends into business decision making and explains how to overcome some of the uncertainty associated with the impact of these risks.
  • CAPEX. This guide outlines how businesses can adapt their existing capital investment appraisal processes to integrate social and environmental issues and shows how traditional investment decisions can be broadened and made more cost-effective and resilient.

The four guides can be downloaded from the A4S website. The CFO Network plans to publish further case studies and to develop additional guidance, including on integrated management reporting and on embedding sustainability into budgeting and forecasting.

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