Unless we can get the accountancy profession to ‘swallow the alarm clock’, we can expect the same climate change apathy beyond the window dressing in ESG reports. Perhaps a jolt in a different direction may help. Climate change is not just about floods and droughts but also the prospect of changing disease patterns and future epidemics.
Kurt Sartorius Climate change activist, Professor of Accounting at University of University of the Witwatersrand
In the words of corporate ESG consultant Sarah Keys (CPA Canada), we need to get the accountancy profession to swallow the alarm clock and take the lead in promoting corporate climate change activism. The corporate world is a microcosm of the problems encountered at the COP27 climate change summit, namely everyone thinks it is someone else’s problem, that they didn’t cause it so why should they fix it. In a corporate sense it is just as easy to understand firm-level avoidance of responsibility, as well as the difficulty of quantifying their own climate change business risk. A recent joint attempt by Wits University and SAICA illustrates just how apathetic corporate South Africa is about investing in climate change initiatives beyond tinkering with company emissions.
Over the past five years, we are almost getting normalised to seeing catastrophic floods and droughts. Perhaps taking a human health and disease perspective on climate change might trigger the alarm clock. Climate change is not just about floods, droughts, fires and tornadoes, it is also about changing disease patterns and climate change-induced epidemics that will occur in a warmer, sicker world. Nowhere will this be more apparent than the continent of Africa.
Just recently, many medical journal editors have been questioning the link between climate change and disease, as well as its impact on households and business sectors. In Africa, for instance, a small increase in temperature will promote an increase in multiple vector-borne diseases that will transmit to humans and livestock. Malaria (228 million cases and 405 000 deaths in 2018 globally), for example, might be projected to migrate to Durban and westwards from the Lowveld. Simultaneously, floods will trigger massive outbreaks of waterborne disease like cholera, typhoid and diarrhoea. Perhaps the most sinister prospect will be the emergence of pandemics like COVID-19 that will be prompted by the mass migration and co-habitation of man and wildlife that will incubate lethal infectious pathogens. Who would have imagined that if the polar ice caps melt, there is a possibility of a 20 000-year-old pathogen being activated in the frozen carcass of a mammoth, that the variola virus could still be detected in a 300-year-old Siberian mummy. It is only a matter of time before a deadly new virus will be incubated in an animal-human transmission environment induced by climate change.
The accountancy profession can take the lead in driving climate change activism in South Africa beyond upping the ante in ESG reporting. We can do it. We are at the coalface of corporate power, we have the brains, the resources − just not the commitment.
Do you have a change project?
Don’t be the company that is stealing the very future of our children while maintaining they are concerned about it (Greta Thunberg).
Try counting your money while you hold your breath.
In the words of Robert Kaplan: ‘If there is one way an organisation can make a start it is to accurately measure their CO2 emissions.’
If you are a reader, you are an accountant, and you have a feasible climate change project, then please contact ASA.
