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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. Finally, accounting standards tell us how to verify and report our measurements.
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 strengths and weaknesses, 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.
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