How the “universal language” of impact accounting can integrate sustainability with finance

Around three years ago, Charles Giancarlo, CEO of data platform Pure Storage, came back from Davos and asked his sustainability team to look into an idea he’d encountered at the meeting: Impact accounting, a method for integrating emissions and other externalities into company balance sheets. 

The idea had been slowly picking up adherents in Europe for around a decade, but Pure Storage, which rebranded this month to Everpure, would go on to become the first U.S. company to join the Value Balancing Alliance (VBA), a group of 30 or so companies developing the approach. Trellis checked in last week with Everpure and the VBA for an update.

How does impact accounting work?

At the heart of the approach are a set of “valuation factors,” developed by third-party experts, that are used to convert activity data for emissions, water use, air pollution and other externalities into dollar figures that can be integrated into balance sheets. In the case of emissions, for example, the VBA uses $220 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent, a figure based on the estimated social impact of rising greenhouse gases levels. 

At Everpure, one long-term goal is to have cost centers be aware of the dollar impact of relevant externalities. After an initial focus on identifying and collecting the most material data, the team is now rolling out a dashboard containing several years of impact accounting numbers.

“It’s catered to different personas,” explained Adrienne Uphoff, Everpure’s ESG regulations and impact accounting manager. Finance was an initial use case, with product managers also on the roadmap. “You can compare it to financial numbers to really understand the impact intensity.”

What value does the approach bring?

“The essence of impact accounting is that you’re translating all these different metrics in the sustainability space into the language the decision makers understand,” said Christian Heller, the VBA’s CEO. “Everyone understands what you’re talking about, and you get a sense of the magnitude of your impact and the risks and opportunities.”

This has allowed Everpure to calculate what Uphoff called the “environmental costs of goods sold” and to estimate the impact of circular strategies, such as refurbishing hardware. The analysis reveals “impact savings across the full value chain across five different environmental topics all in a single dollar unit,” she said. 

Analyses like that can then be shared with customers and used to distinguish Everpure from competitors. “The long-term winners in this space are going to be those that can perform against sustainability goals,” said Kathy Mulvany, Everpure’s global head of sustainability. “Impact accounting gives us a way to bring comparability, so companies can understand how they’re truly stacking up.”

What does it take to implement impact accounting?

A great deal of technical work goes into creating valuation factors, but the system is designed so that outside experts create the numbers and hand them to sustainability professionals for use. Still, not every company will have the in-house environmental data that is also needed. Many companies have been collecting emissions data for five years or more, for example, but detailed datasets for water use are less common.

Internal teams also need to be familiar with the concepts. “One of the key learnings from our impact accounting implementation is that the socialization curve is longer than you expect,” said Uphoff. “Attaching monetary values on externalities introduces new metrics and mental models, and that can naturally make people a little nervous at first. It takes time and dialogue for teams to build confidence in how to interpret this new lens on performance.” 

What’s next?

In the early days of impact accounting, companies and consultancies worked independently on different methodologies. Now that work is coalescing, said Heller. The International Standards Organization will start work on a standard this summer, he added, and the VBA is having conversations with the IFRS Foundation, which creates international financial reporting standards.

The approach may also be integrated into mandatory disclosure standards. Heller noted that the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive mentions the potential benefits of companies putting a dollar figure on some environmental impacts. “It’s the next evolutionary step of any kind of sustainability disclosure regulations,” he said.

.