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Staples, Macmillan Publishers, PubWorx, Lindenmeyr and Midland are among leading companies using EPAT.
The Environmental Paper Assessment Tool (www.epat.org) is a web-based platform that allows suppliers and buyers of paper and paper-based packaging to share key sustainability metrics.
EPAT has been in use for the past 15 years by several North American companies and is now in its third improved version. The tool is based on measured data from supplying pulp and paper mills for over 25 performance indicators in the life cycle of paper-based products, including greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint data.
Environmental, social and governance risks are both business and investment risks, and chartered accountants are at the heart of reporting on them as well as the financials.
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks are being incorporated into management, as well as investment, decision-making - whether it s lending decisions, equity investing, green bonds, or anything else, says Neil Stewart, Director of Corporate Outreach at the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB).
“Value creation, its preservation or erosion as a result of these ESG risks is now being quantified,” says Stewart, “and so too is corporate performance against these risks. This is what puts the accounting profession at the centre of this ESG world.”
Crumbling levels of trust in data and information is a part of a drop in trust more generally. Learn how chartered accountants will be called on to help, now and in the future.
Trust has always been the bedrock of a functioning society. The earliest human communities couldn’t have grown crops or raised livestock if they didn’t trust one another, and as humans spread across the world building larger, more complex societies and economies, trust underpinned their success.
Trust has also been at the heart of the accounting profession since its inception, and work is underway to ensure it retains its reputation for trustworthiness.
A sustainable future requires businesses to maximise more than profits and governments to look beyond rising GDP. Chartered accountants must understand their unique role in making this happen, argues Peter Bakker, CEO of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
In 2012, Peter Bakker told the Rio+20 UN conference that “accountants will save the world” from climate change. He was one of the first people to highlight how real change would come from reconfiguring the millions of decisions that managers in business, NGOs and the public sector make every day, all over the world. To do so, they need to understand not just the financial costs and benefits of those decisions but the environmental and social trade-offs too. He outlined his thinking in a Harvard Business Review article in 2013, and the idea took off.
Climate change is already impacting business and society worldwide. Yet the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are driving global average temperatures upward continue to climb.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that GHG emissions must be reduced 50-85% from 2000 levels by 2050 to limit global warming to 2.0 -2.4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and avoid the worst impacts of climate change (IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, 2007).
A critical first step for both businesses and governments to effectively reduce their emissions is to prepare a GHG inventory. The greenhouse gas protocol led by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), provides the means to this end.