Accountants and managers can be a roadblock to environmental initiatives if they don’t see the financial value in a proposal. But a push to incorporate sustainability into university accounting programs is starting to produce graduates who, instead, can champion the long-term benefits of such projects.
The University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) has been looking at how it can enmesh sustainability in all of its business degrees, rather than leaving it confined to environmental disciplines or treating it as a one-off, “add-on” topic.
In the accounting program, this is being done by teaching students core accounting concepts using energy efficiency as the context.
“Instead of saying you have ‘normal’ accounting and you then have ‘triple bottom line’, we are saying sustainability should be incorporated in ‘business as usual’ accounting practices,” says UTS School of Accounting lecturer, Dr Paul Brown, who has been involved in redesigning the curriculum.
Triple bottom line refers to the measurement of social and environmental as well as financial performance. A similar concept is corporate social responsibility, or CSR, which usually involves triple-bottom-line reporting.
Sustainability is the broader, overarching concept, Dr Brown says. “Sustainability refers to the long term, to the concept that decisions made today should not harm quality of life for future generations, should not erode our stocks of natural or human capital.”
Accountants come into the equation because they’re the gatekeepers of information that’s crucial to good decision making.
“There’s an axiom that says, ‘What gets measured gets managed’,” Dr Brown says. “If you’re talking about information for decision making, then someone has to put together and interpret that information, and accountants are usually involved in that.
“There’s a role for accountants to provide information to decision makers to make them to think about the long term.”
At UTS, energy efficiency is being used as the context for study in various accounting subjects, from undergraduate to postgraduate level.
Final-year management accounting students, for example, were recently assigned a major assessment project where, using their particular skills and training, they had to come up with ways to make UTS buildings more energy efficient. Among other things, they were asked to design a management control system that would help drive behavioural change, to spur energy efficiency.
The project was so successful that some students were asked to present their ideas to the university and a number of the proposals are under consideration.
“For the students involved in that project, to go out into practice now and not see the links between broader sustainability and what they’re doing is unlikely,” Dr Brown says.
Another project involving accounting students considered how the data from a new sub-metering system could be analysed and used to support energy efficiency efforts at UTS. (Sub-metering records energy consumption by individual users or sites within a larger property.)
Far from the “bean counter” stereotype, accountants sign up to professional standards that require them to work in the best interests of society, Dr Brown says.
“There’s more to accounting and business studies than just the pursuit of profit for profit’s sake,” he says. “All business schools have a tradition of this; most of our students want this. Some of our best graduates are out to do something beyond just the traditional debits and credits of financial reporting.”
