Context and issues
Socio-environmental accounting is increasingly becoming a key socioeconomic issue, particularly in the context of ecological transition, whether at the level of organizations, territories or states.
In France, a number of regulations already require a number of companies to make an extra-financial performance statement in their annual report and, in general, encourage greater communication on these aspects.
The issue of socio-environmental accounting is thus highlighted in the recent report (January 2018) of the HighLevel Expert Group on Sustainable Finance (HLEG), which recommends that the European Union update its guidelines on corporate financial statements to include extra-financial information.
Similarly, recommendation No. 10 of the Notat/Senard report ("The company, an object of collective interest") proposes to: "Undertake a concerted study on the conditions that accounting standards must meet in order to serve the general interest and the consideration of social and environmental issues".
In this context, several models and approaches to corporate socio-environmental accounting exist and are emerging, but they remain extremely controversial in their ability to address a real ecological transformation of companies, to allow adaptation to a renewal of corporate governance and to articulate the extra-financial issues of the company with those of the territories and states.
In particular, the proposed models are generally conceived in a "weak sustainability" vision, with little scientific biophysical basis, disconnected from the reality of the ecosystems and societal systems in which companies live.
Beyond the perimeter of a given company, there is a major need to develop new accounts at the scale of collective ecosystem management (taken in the broad sense: a lake, a wetland, a watershed, an ecological corridor, a bird population), where the achievement of measurable ecological performance is at stake.
In fact, compliance with ecological limits and thresholds and the achievement of results in improving the state of a given ecosystem goes beyond the company’s sole scope of responsibility and action. The creation or destruction of ecological value results from interactions between the company and other private or public organisations with often divergent interests and strategies, which impact the ecosystem or contribute in a differentiated and often uncoordinated manner to its management.
The aim of ecosystem-centric accounting is therefore to operationalise the preservation of the natural capital of our territories while recognising the diversity of the ecological issues involved and the contexts of action. This recent field of research and innovation is based in particular on an interdisciplinary dialogue between accounting and conservation sciences and on the experimentation of an accounting model specifically designed to equip the inter-organizational management of ecosystems.
As far as national accounting is concerned, the main indicators of wealth - and in particular GDP (gross domestic product) - appear today to be unable to reflect changes in the ecological stakes of our societies. Thus, the notion of a country’s wealth has evolved considerably over the past few years, leading France, in particular, through the law of 13 April 2015, to consider new indicators to measure wealth in the definition of its public policies. This follows in particular the recommendations of the Report of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (known as the "Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report" published in 2008).
In this context, the Ministry in charge of the Environment and national and international statistical agencies are working on the development of new national accounting standards. This work is taking place in particular within the framework of the UN System of Economic and Environmental Accounting (SEEA), which is based on the concepts, classifications and definitions of the systems of national accounts. These new tools will play an important role in determining future macroeconomic sustainability criteria. It therefore seems important for the Chair to grasp the respective scopes as well as the limitations of these initiatives in a context where there are alternative visions of what sustainability refers to and where the Chair advocates a strong sustainability approach.
The aim of the Chair is therefore to enable extensive research, shared in particular by its partners, in order to initiate responses to these issues, and thus to make possible a genuine ecological transition with strong sustainability of organizations, territories and countries, in an articulation ranging from the company to society as a whole.
