8 May 2018: A guide to help management accountants and their organizations achieve the SDGs has been published by the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) and Chartered Global Management Accountants (CGMA). The guide titled, ‘Creating a Sustainable Future: The Role of the Accountant in Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals,’ details how businesses and management accountants can benefit from SDG-related opportunities, and how finance professionals can help achieve an organization’s social and socio-economic objectives.

The guide underscores the fundamental role of business in delivering on the SDGs, including by creating jobs, enabling access to healthcare, innovating new technologies, and spearheading the development and responsible use of resources like energy and water. It also provides examples of ways in which organizations in different sectors and across geographic regions are already contributing to and meeting requirements of the SDGs.

Management accountants play an important role in making the business case for pursuing appropriate SDGs.

According to the report, management accountants play an important role in making the business case for pursuing appropriate SDGs, monitoring and evaluating their impact, and ensuring alignment of sustainability initiatives with corporate activities. Moreover, they can: encourage businesses to meet SDG requirements through improved innovation capabilities; emphasize the importance of ethical behavior throughout the value chain; provide decision makers with information about sustainability factors, which can be integrated into business planning and reporting; focus more on best practice in governance and stewardship; help form strategic partnerships; and help businesses base their corporate reports on the six “capitals” of integrated reporting: human, social and relationship, intellectual, natural, manufacturing and financial.

The report recommends that accountants and their employers should focus on those SDGs most relevant to their industry, sector and business type. It includes tools and methods to help businesses manage reputational risk, respond to globalization, digitization and the impacts of policy changes and meet investor demand for greater reporting transparency. The guide suggests that management accountants’ skill sets (expertise in governance, risk management and control, business analysis and decision support), organizational role and ethical commitment place the profession at the forefront of SDG planning and implementation.

The guide also provides steps that employees can take to determine: whether their employers are aligning with and contributing to the SDGs; how business and organizations are making a difference with respect to each of the SDGs; and how to build the SDGs into organizational culture and thinking. Regarding the latter, the report proposes: building the SDGs into organizational strategies and business; engaging supply chain partners and company ecosystems with the SDGs; reporting on the SDGs as part of integrated reporting; and building the “learn and relearn” feedback loop into planning and strategy development.

CGMA is the most widely held management accounting designation in the world. [CGMA press release] [Publication: Creating a Sustainable Future: The Role of the Accountant in Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals]