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This means we are looking for a deeper description of what climate action and accounting is than just a description of how things currently are. We are more looking for a description of how things will be in 100 years from now. We attempt to break down the phenomenon of climate action and the process of climate accounting to its most essential structure and use that as a basis for designing representation thereof in software.
Impact accounting within the context of climate action and the SDGs
The surroundings of a living being, i.e. the space or sphere in which it operates or functions, is generally referred to as the environment of the living being. Earth, as the home of a vast number of living beings, can be seen as consisting of a vast number of environments. Some of these environments have clear geographical boundaries, but many do not; most of these environments in fact overlap or can be viewed as sub-environments of some larger environment (e.g. a tidal pool can be viewed as an environment on its own, but it can also be viewed as part of the environment of its surrounding shoreline).
The state of an environment refers to the conditions prevalent in the environment. The more favourable the conditions are for sustaining life, the better (more valuable) the state is said to be; the less favourable the conditions are for sustaining life, the worse (less valuable) the state is said to be. Conditions are measured in terms of parameters, such as the amount of CO2 in the environment’s atmosphere, or the average daytime temperature inside the environment.
What differentiates living beings from other objects in their environments is the capacity of living beings to willfully engage in certain activities (such as moving themselves from one location to another, or consuming something); non-living beings do not have such a capacity (e.g. a rock can be moved from the top of a hill to the foot of the hill by wind or water or some other force, but it cannot move from the top of the hill to the foot of the hill by its own will). This means that when a living being is the willful agent of an activity, the living being in question can be held accountable for the impact that the activity in question has on the state of their environment.
To be able to hold an agent accountable in a manner that is fair and just, we need to be reasonably sure how their activities impact their environment – and this is where accounting standards come into play. The impact that the activity of an agent has on the state of their environment is measured and expressed in terms of the changes that the activity causes in the defining parameters of the environment; an accounting standard tells us how to measure these parameters, i.e. which of them we should measure, how often we should measure them and what methods we should use to measure them. Accounting standards also tell us how to determine the boundaries of the environment of interest and what the desired state thereof is.
The problem of plurality
The problem is that humankind has, over the years, created different accounting standards for the same activities and agents, and the differences between them often lead to disagreements between their findings of how and to what extent a certain agent’s activities impact their environment. The solution to this problem is unfortunately not as simple as just choosing one of the standards and getting all of humankind to only use that standard henceforth – each of the standards have their pros and cons, and the arguments against a specific standard is often just as many as the arguments for that standard. The solution, instead, seems to lie in finding a structured way to compare the different standards – their requirements, their approaches, and what they take into account.
Generic formulation of the accounting process
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For things we experience directly we do not need any further assurance that they are true. The cred
Credit: Alfonso Govela (Alfonso Govela)
Ontology, epistemology and semiology
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