Empowering Business: Navigating Nature-Related Reporting
Sustainability
February 6, 2025A new report from ACCA Empowering Business: Navigating Nature-Related Reporting, calls on accountants to get to grips with the concepts, principles, challenges and opportunities of nature-related reporting.
ACCA is urging financial professionals to use its report as a way of engaging with boards and executive management. Accountants have a crucial role to play in this regard as stewards of organisational resilience and enablers of trust and transparency between organisations and financial markets.
By undertaking nature-related reporting, organisations can drive meaningful action to tackle the sustainability-related challenges. Nature-related reporting involves disclosing an organisation’s material nature-related impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities. It underpins many of the interconnections between the natural, social and human capitals.
"Information is material if omitting, misstating or obscuring that information could reasonably be expected to influence decisions that primary users of general-purpose financial reports make on the basis of those reports."
Nature-related risk is split across three areas: physical, transitional and systemic; the last highlights the fundamental role that nature-related reporting plays in safeguarding all capitals. Accountants are already familiar with assessing risk, and their core understanding of financial and sustainability-related risk in disclosure and financial decision making can be used as a building block for disclosing on nature-related impacts and dependencies.
Challenges and Opportunities:
Accountants face challenges and opportunities in sourcing, disseminating and reporting on nature-related data. This involves both upskilling and ethical considerations. However, the work is consistent with the profession’s long-held role of underpinning long-term business resilience.
Policy & Insights (EEMA & UK), ACCA, says: "Nature is the foundation for all life on Earth and our research suggests that an overwhelming number of organisations do not effectively assess and communicate their impacts and dependencies on nature" Jessica Bingham, Regional Lead
The report suggests accountants should:
Secure management commitment: nature-related reporting might require undertaking voluntary reporting to align with peers’ practices, stakeholder expectations and cross-jurisdictional regulations.
Undertake stakeholder mapping: organisations need to identify their key stakeholders and regulatory reporting obligations to inform the approach that they take to nature-related reporting.
Ensure alignment of targets and commitments to international commitments.
The report examines the current global state of nature-related reporting, which relies on several different frameworks and guidelines and examples of best practices of nature-related reporting.
Looking ahead the report identifies challenges facing the profession in the area of nature-related reporting and the part it has in driving action to restore natural habitats and ecosystems.
