Value-transforming financial, carbon and biodiversity footprint accounting

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Geneidy, S. El, Peura, M., Aumanen, V. M., Baumeister, S., Helimo, U., Vainio, V., Kotiaho, J. S.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Geneidy, S. El
Peura, M.
Aumanen, V. M.
Baumeister, S.
Helimo, U.
Vainio, V.
Kotiaho, J. S.
author_facet Geneidy, S. El
Peura, M.
Aumanen, V. M.
Baumeister, S.
Helimo, U.
Vainio, V.
Kotiaho, J. S.
contents Transformative changes in our production and consumption habits are needed to halt biodiversity loss. Organizations are the way we humans have organized our everyday life, and much of our negative environmental impacts, also called carbon and biodiversity footprints, are caused by organizations. Here we explore how the accounts of any organization can be exploited to develop an integrated carbon and biodiversity footprint account. As a metric we utilize spatially explicit potential global loss of species across all ecosystem types and argue that it can be understood as the biodiversity equivalent. The utility of the biodiversity equivalent for biodiversity could be like what carbon dioxide equivalent is for climate. We provide a global country specific dataset that organizations, experts and researchers can use to assess consumption-based biodiversity footprints. We also argue that the current integration of financial and environmental accounting is superficial, and provide a framework for a more robust financial value-transforming accounting model. To test the methodologies, we utilized a Finnish university as a living lab. Assigning an offsetting cost to the footprints significantly altered the financial value of the organization. We believe such value-transforming accounting is needed to draw the attention of senior executives and investors to the negative environmental impacts of their organizations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_14186
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Value-transforming financial, carbon and biodiversity footprint accounting
Geneidy, S. El
Peura, M.
Aumanen, V. M.
Baumeister, S.
Helimo, U.
Vainio, V.
Kotiaho, J. S.
General Economics
Economics
Transformative changes in our production and consumption habits are needed to halt biodiversity loss. Organizations are the way we humans have organized our everyday life, and much of our negative environmental impacts, also called carbon and biodiversity footprints, are caused by organizations. Here we explore how the accounts of any organization can be exploited to develop an integrated carbon and biodiversity footprint account. As a metric we utilize spatially explicit potential global loss of species across all ecosystem types and argue that it can be understood as the biodiversity equivalent. The utility of the biodiversity equivalent for biodiversity could be like what carbon dioxide equivalent is for climate. We provide a global country specific dataset that organizations, experts and researchers can use to assess consumption-based biodiversity footprints. We also argue that the current integration of financial and environmental accounting is superficial, and provide a framework for a more robust financial value-transforming accounting model. To test the methodologies, we utilized a Finnish university as a living lab. Assigning an offsetting cost to the footprints significantly altered the financial value of the organization. We believe such value-transforming accounting is needed to draw the attention of senior executives and investors to the negative environmental impacts of their organizations.
title Value-transforming financial, carbon and biodiversity footprint accounting
topic General Economics
Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14186