Advances in corporate natural capital accounting

Publication date: 29/01/2024
Extent: 16 pages

Contributions by: Joël Houdet, The Biodiversity Footprint Company and University of Pretoria, South Africa

Chapter synopsis:

Several attempts have been made to classify business accounting approaches with respect to environmental issues. This chapter provides a short overview of such approaches, underlining their diversity in framing, methods and applications, and highlights recent attempts to standardise corporate natural capital accounting (CNCA), towards making the ‘going concern’ of natural capital stocks at the core of the accounting process. While CNCA generates both opportunities and challenges for agri-food industries, accounting for the state of biodiversity and other natural capital stocks throughout supply chains remains a major gap. Despite its obvious benefits for shared corporate accountability across value chains, there are significant barriers to broad-scale adoption in the short term, including ongoing research needs and significant capacity constraints/upskilling requirements.

DOI: 10.19103/AS.2023.0128.01