Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hello. My name is Jeffrey Unerman.
I am a Professor of Accounting and Corporate
Accountability at Royal Holloway, University of London,
and it's my pleasure to present to you today an HS talk providing
an introductory overview of accounting for sustainability.
0:19
What I hope to accomplish in this talk is firstly,
to explain how complexity of
decision-making is made considerably more complex when we take into
account the interacting dimensions of
social and environmental sustainability alongside
more conventional considerations of economic sustainability.
I then want to move on to look at how some techniques of
sustainability accounting can help organizations embed within
the decision-making and the management control and awareness of how
social and environmental risks and opportunities interact with economic factors.
And finally, I want to look at the area of
sustainability reporting and how this can help
organizations in their duties of accountability,
not just to owners,
but to a broad range of stakeholders.
1:14
So to start off with,
we will look at how decision-making becomes a lot more
complex when we take into account the interacting dimensions of sustainability.
In order to do this,
we need to start off,
I believe, by looking at what the overall role of accounting is.
1:32
In very basic terms,
the overall of accounting will be familiar to
many people as a technology that helps communicate
information in a way that helps people and organizations make better decisions.
Therefore, accounting really at its very essence is about aiding decision-making.
To understand sustainability accounting in this context,
it's necessarily for us to unpack what we
mean by decisions and how accounting helps in those decisions.
