The history of ecological accounting in business is relatively new with the onset of regulatory carbon reporting for listed companies in 2006.
The scope of businesses to fall under this reporting requirement is to be extended to all companies with more than 250 employees in 2019.
Current practice centres on the energy consumption of a company both directly with gas and electricity bills but also through 3rd party association such as business travel.
But the current focus on carbon emissions is just one aspect of non financial reporting. There are several other measurements businesses are urged to make such as water, eutrophication, toxicity and more. Carbon is just the beginning.
Current ecological accounting takes two principle forms:
Regulatory reporting, primarily carbon emissions, detected by current business activity.
Supply chain collaboration and analysis to detect industrial hotspots as priorities to reduce environmental impact.
The above identifies where specific industrial activity has to be improved but does it address the complete sustainability challenge.
Everyone understands that carbon emissions are just one part of a complex environmental picture.
The consumer, your market, are becoming increasingly sensitive to environmental concerns.
In addition to those concerns there are increasing demands on anti green washing (a lack of trust issue), higher expectations of transparency (to address the trust issue) and accountability (everyone has to start telling the truth).
Regulations such as carbon emmissions reporting have been introduced but this is just the start of a bigger trend.
Current business practice has to apply extra manual steps to address their new reporting obligations, such as measuring carbon events.
Wouldn't it be simpler to have a fully automated ecological data flow that did all this measurement and more for you?
The ideal system would cope with varying suppliers, varying geographies and varying product mixes automatically, right?
Automated data flow.
Exploits a novel "ecological currency".
Comprehensive ecoligical measurement.
An extension of life cycle analysis.