Environmental & Sustainability Solutions CC (ESS) is a professional consultancy that focuses on the interface between Environment and Business. We specialise in the emerging field of Environmental Accounting.
What is NewGRI Certified Training into Africa.
ESS has presented the GRI Certified Training Programme on Sustainability Reporting to First Quantum Minerals, a copper mine group with operations in Zambia, the DRC and Mauritania, to staff members in Ndola, Zambia during July. In-house training programmes will also be run in November in Mauritania. [Posted 29 October 2009]
Our Mission
Our mission is to assist clients in meeting their Sustainable Development objectives by employing the full spectrum of Environmental Accounting tools. This will enhance the cost-effective management of environmental and other sustainability aspects, impacts and obligations whilst bolstering the bottom line and adding long-term value to the organisation. ESS Approach to Environmental Accounting- Environmental management and accounting should be integrated in the core business of organisations.
- Environmental accounting should support the cost-effective implementation of environmental compliance and management in organisations.
- The benchmark for the generation of waste and pollution should be zero waste.
- In order to really make a difference towards a more sustainable society, organisations should fundamentally and transformationally rethink their processes. This will provide first-mover leadership benefits.
- All of us have a stewardship responsibility regarding the use of the earth and its resources, and the implications thereof on the people.
Business Case for Environmental Accounting
Growing pressures on the environment and increasing environmental awareness have generated the need to account for the many interactions between all sectors of the economy and the environment. As a result the financial implications of environmental issues are receiving more and more attention. Environmental Accounting is an overarching term used to cover all aspects of the interface between environmental issues and the financial implications thereof, be it at the corporate, the regional or even the national level. The coining of the phrase triple-bottom-line by John Elkington in 1994 has hastened the realisation that environmental and other sustainability issues can profoundly affect the bottom line of companies. The King II Report has canonised the need for companies and organisations in South Africa to carry out their business in a sustainable and socially responsible way.
Experience over the past decade has proven that systematic attention to the interface between environmental aspects and the financial implications thereof can benefit an organisation substantively, not only in terms of its financial bottom line but also with regard to its image, its stakeholder relations and, ultimately, its license to operate. Tools such as Environmental Accounting have been developed to assist in this process.
The principles of environmental accounting are not only applicable at organisational level. Countries have come to realise that their natural resources form the basis of their natural capital from which they should draw interest in a sustainable manner. Being able to value their environmental resources in economic terms will enhance decision-making regarding optimal resource use. In order to assist this approach the United Nations developed a system of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting. |
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