The Role of Accounting Professionals in ESG Reporting & Disclosure

Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting and disclosure

Sustainability is an increasingly hot topic in the accounting and finance world, but what does it mean for you and your role?

This course provides an understanding and walks you through multiple real-world case studies for the variety of roles that will be affected by ESG, whether internally in an organization or externally in firms.

You'll see how the accounting role fits into everyday sustainability processes required internally in reporting and disclosure activities. And also, learn about the latest developments in regulations and frameworks and be given resources to help continue your learning.

For various accounting and finance professionals, this course will help them understand how sustainability efforts will be carried out internally by the profession to produce reporting, etc. They will understand how to implement it internally within their organization and how an accounting firm looking to provide assurance or advisory services will be involved in sustainability processes.

Key Topics

• Trends around sustainability reporting and disclosure
• Key processes in sustainability reporting and disclosure
• How accounting roles involved in the sustainability processes are required to report and disclose
• Examples of everyday sustainability outputs of reporting and disclosure

Learning Outcomes

• Recognize the key trends affecting sustainability reporting and disclosure.
• Identify the various stages in an ESG process that helps organizations arrive at the ability to report and disclose.
• Identify who makes up an ESG team and how an organization should communicate a clear ESG story.
• Apply the concept of materiality assessment and analysis to real-world scenarios.
• Recall the process for forming a climate risk assessment and register.
• Recall the process for gathering GHG carbon emissions and the process external advisory services will undertake to review the GHG emissions.

Who Will Benefit

• Any accounting or finance professional who wants to understand more about what carbon accounting is, why it's important to their role and how to execute it
• Accounting professionals who provide advisory services (including ESG matters) for clients and need to advise B&I clients on how to setup procedures to scope, identify, record and manage their sustainability strategy goals
• Accounting professionals who provide assurance services that may include sustainability information or data
• Accounting and finance professionals who recognize it is crucial to understand how to implement processes that help produce sustainability data or provide advisory services over sustainability strategies because they have a key role to play in driving sustainable strategic and operational decisions based upon data produced