* Companies, countries plan to put nature on balance sheet
* Regulators, stock markets study ways to value pollution
* Fifty-seven nations agree to revise national accounting
* Resource losses seen trimming Global growth by 7 percent
(Updates with comment from Puma CEO)
By Jeb Blount
RIO DE JANEIRO, June 20 (Reuters) – Corporate and government
accounting will likely reflect environmental profit and loss
within a decade, thanks partly to progress made this week at a
U.N. conference in Rio de Janeiro, backers of the plan told
Reuters on Thursday.
Company accounting and calculations of gross domestic
product (GDP) are flawed because they fail to show governments,
consumers and managers the true costs of their activities, said
Pavan Sukhdev, a board member of U.S. environmental group
Conservation International and a former Deutsche Bank AG banker.
The main reason is that accounting practices fail to account
for the creation, use and degradation of air, water, trees, and
other “natural assets” in the same way they account for
factories, credit and other assets, he said.
He estimates that the top 3,000 companies fail to account
for $2.1 trillion of charges related to the use or pollution of
natural assets – say by releasing carbon dioxide into the air or
waste into a river. That figure nearly doubles to $4 trillion,
or about 6.7 percent of global GDP, when the world’s entire
corporate sector is included, he said.
Continued…
