Efforts continue to capture information better, within the natural world and the financial one that underpins flows of capital. Can accountants really save the world, as Peter Bakker, CEO of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, audaciously suggested (‘It’s time for chartered accountants to save the world’, ICAEW, April 30, 2021)?
A good place to start is to look at what we know. Take the carbon cycle, the backbone of life, which links an astonishing range of organisms and processes.
Just over a decade ago, researchers were contemplating where around one billion tonnes of warming carbon dioxide (CO2) might have gone. Scientists assumed some of the carbon produced by human activities had been sequestered by trees in the vast boreal forests in northern latitudes. In fact, the ‘lost’ mass was later found in tropical zones.
