Client: Global Accounting Alliance
Partners: ERM, IDEEA Group, The Biodiversity Footprint Company
eftec team: Ian Dickie, Ally Couchman
Document: GAA-CNCA-Workshops-Final-Report-03-2024.pdf
Over half of the world’s total gross domestic product (US$44 trillion) is moderately or highly dependent on nature (WEF, 2020). With the growing climate-water-biodiversity crises, corporations are seeing rising risks and opportunities for their ability to contribute to this value.
The natural capital perspective offers a systematic and wide-scoped look at the relevant impacts and dependencies on nature and associated risks and opportunities. There is an ever growing set of methods and tools for measuring, mapping, modelling and valuing natural capital. The variety is encouraging but can also be confusing for professionals, including accountants, who wish to select the relevant ones.
Corporate Natural Capital Accounting (CNCA) uses a clear set of standard approaches to quantify, and value natural capital, combine and analyse different data and report these in a consistent, coherent and comparable way. Such reporting can be used for regulatory compliance, external disclosures, environmental performance assessment, tracking progress to targets, comparing options, and risk and opportunity assessment.
Project Background
The Global Accounting Alliance (GAA) is a forum comprised of the world’s 10 leading professional accountancy bodies, who work together to share information and foster collaboration across their collective 1,400,000 members.
The GAA, in its role in encouraging the accounting profession to adopt CNCA, commissioned eftec and partners to deliver workshops to international groups of accounting professionals, to introduce and explain natural capital accounting and the CNCA methodology.
Our Approach
We worked with GAA to define the audience and their needs before designing and delivering bespoke training. Training covered the CNCA process, how to work with stakeholders, and considering the barriers and solutions to implementing CNCA.
We first organised two online briefings for accounting professionals in the Atlantic and Pacific regions. These introduced the concept of natural capital accounting and its materiality to business, the set of seven standardizations and principles of CNCA, and a discussion with corporate representatives who shared their experiences of using CNCA. The briefings were followed by engagement with CNCA experts and accountants to gather their inputs to refine a paper on options and roadmap to advance CNCA.
Outcomes
Through this process, we found that challenges and opportunities faced by organisations adopting CNCA included:
Improve knowledge and communication of the business case for CNCA within organisations
Building skills and resource capacity within organisations to implement CNCA
Assessing how much to invest in capacity, technology, software and data collection for CNCA implementation
A need for greater clarity on which frameworks to use
Building understanding of the differences between the terminology used in financial accounting and natural capital accounting.
This project helped inform a guide published by the GAA in March 2025 to raise awareness amongst accounting professionals of not only the natural capital accounting approach but also the importance of building resilience and value through nature-positive action. The guide draws on the findings of the workshops and includes advice on how to report the nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities, as well as case studies and signposting to useful resources.
The ISO 14054 on Natural Capital Accounting for Organizations being drafted by the International Standards Organization also covers similar ground and will be available in early 2026, at the latest.