Matias Laine: Can accounting solve global challenges?
“Over the past decade, sustainability accounting has become established as a field of research in accounting. In business, sustainability reporting has also become a common practice for organizations. The situation was different back in the first part of the 2000s when only a few people were interested in environmental accounting and researchers were met with belittlement and had to justify their research topics.”
Laine is particularly interested in the role of accounting in tackling environmental challenges. He believes that accounting can promote sustainable development by making social and ecological issues visible, measurable and manageable, and by including them in organizational decision-making. The key is to try to understand the ways in which the indicators measuring carbon emissions or the use of natural resources, for example, are linked to traditional financial calculations.
According to Laine, the information generated by accounting often serves as a basis for decision-making in society. The way we do accounts and choose accounting methods affect organizations and societies, and thereby have impacts on the natural environment. This makes critical accounting research relevant.
“It is vital that we explore new, different and surprising phenomena, even if they currently seem to be only marginal deviations from the mainstream.”
