Keeping track of cash flow is essential for any business.


However, increasingly companies are realising they also have to monitor the cost and benefit of their work on society and the environment.
At Lancaster University, Professor Jan Bebbington dedicates her time to working with businesses to help them ensure good results for the planet and their bottom line.
Jan is also director of the University’s Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business.
She says all accounting is focused on either controlling what is happening in an organisation or presenting that information to people externally.
“You can do that in a plain colour, or you can do it in a green colour. A green bean counter is something quite different, we’re interested in more things,” she said. “People start out by thinking that accounting is just a technical measure, that it’s about keeping track of money; how you get a loan, how much you pay for it, when you make something, how much you charge someone to buy it.
“It is all of those things, but it’s also a social process as well. An environmental accountant is interested in the environmental implications that arise from technical accounting, but then also how accounting and finance related things can help organisations be more responsive to environmental concerns.”
Jan says environmental accounting often focuses on three issues; climate change, nature loss and so-called ‘novel materials’ which can cause harm, including plastic waste and pollution, with all of these issues inevitably bound up with social implications for people and their health.
The power of finance to affect the environment has been in evidence for a long time via government subsidies which are paid to encourage certain outcomes.
In the world of banking, companies can now also access sustainability linked loans, which offer businesses a beneficial rate of interest based on them hitting certain environmental targets.
Lancaster University itself is the recipient of such a loan in the form of a £60m sustainability-linked five-year revolving credit facility from Santander, which is dependent on it achieving certain sustainability performance targets.
This includes goals such as reducing carbon emissions by 40 per cent and increasing the amount of renewable energy it generates by 250 per cent by July 2026.