ACCA wants financial professionals to use this report as a way of engaging with boards and executive management.
Accountants have a crucial role to play in this regard as stewards of organisational resilience and enablers of trust and transparency between organisations and financial markets.
By undertaking nature-related reporting, organisations can drive meaningful action to tackle the sustainability-related challenges.
The most popular goals in efforts to halt and reverse biodiversity loss
- Resources-related goals – 15%
- Waste-related goals – 15%
- Restoration-related goals – 13%
- Adoption of relevant national and international frameworks – 10%
- Biodiversity funding – 8%
- Land-related goals – 8%
- Pollution-related goals – 8%
- Stakeholder-related goals – 8%
- Circularity goals – 5%
- Product-related goals – 5%
- Value chain-related goals – 3%
- Water-related goals – 3%
Challenges and opportunities
Accountants face challenges and opportunities in sourcing, disseminating and reporting on nature-related data. This involves both upskilling and ethical considerations. However, the work is consistent with the profession’s long-held role of underpinning long-term business resilience.
The report suggests accountants should:
- Secure management commitment: nature-related reporting might require undertaking voluntary reporting to align with peers’ practices, stakeholder expectations and cross-jurisdictional regulations.
- Undertake stakeholder mapping: organisations need to identify their key stakeholders and regulatory reporting obligations to inform the approach that they take to nature-related reporting.
- Ensure alignment of targets and commitments to international commitments.
ACCA’s research found that there is considerable room for improvement in the adoption of nature-related reporting, as well as the quality of the disclosure by early adopters of existing frameworks. Collaborating closely with the University of Glasgow to carry out a deep dive into current biodiversity-related reporting and highlight the existing practices of first movers, the research outlines the overall lack of alignment in targets set across the global set of organisations we assessed.
The report defines:
- what is meant by ‘nature’
- shareholders' expectations
- the economic benefits of reporting on nature
- the core principles of nature related reporting – impacts, dependencies, risks, opportunities and materiality.
Definitions of nature-related reporting
Nature: The natural world, with an emphasis on the diversity of living organisms (including people) and their interactions among themselves and with their environment.
Biodiversity: The variability among living organisms from all sources, including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.
Ecosystem services: The contributions of ecosystems to the benefits that are used in economic and other human activities.
The report examines the current global state of nature-related reporting, which relies on several different frameworks and guidelines and examples of best practices of nature-related reporting.
Looking ahead the report identifies challenges facing the profession in the area of nature-related reporting and the part it has in driving action to restore natural habitats and ecosystems.
Read the University of Glasgow Adam Smith Business School and ACCA research report Evidence on companies’ biodiversity disclosures (PDF, 2.8 MB).
