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We work from the assumption that thinking well about these aspects in the beginning will enable us to develop software, systems and processes that will not easily become redundant. This does not mean that one must be able to plan foresee every detail of how things will could develop in future - ; it is in a sense the opposite: If if the basic structure is comprehensive yet flexible and can incorporate learning and development, the chances of becoming redundant in the future is are low.
This means we are not just looking for a description of how things currently are; we are looking for a deeper description of what climate action and accounting is than just a description of how things currently areare in essence. We are more looking for a description of how things will could be in 100 years from now. We attempt to break down the phenomenon concept of climate action and the process of climate accounting down to its their most essential structure and use that as a basis for designing representation thereof in software.
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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).
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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. Finally, accounting standards tell us how to verify and report our measurements.
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Figure 1: Environments within environments. The blue circle depicts Earth (the "global environment") as a subenvironment of the universal environment (the gray ellipsoid). The slightly transparent, green circles with dashed, brown borderlines represent the infinite number of possible environments of interest that exist within the global environment. The large green circle, populated with pictures of animals, trees and humans, depict one such possible environment of interest. The purple rectangle to the right of the diagram depicts the relationship between the (abstract) discipline of impact accounting and the real world - it intersects with reality, but can never account for reality in its fullness.
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.
Generic formulation of the accounting process
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