Accounting | Environmental Debt

The cost of cancer: why health impacts belong on company balance sheets

First published in the Guardian, August 18th, 2014

Like so many of us, I have personal experience with cancer. I’ve had it twice, and so have both of my parents, six aunts and numerous friends. Just last month, someone very close to me was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. These illnesses are more than just statistics. They require the patient, as well as their families and friends, to journey through a pretty broken medical system, and their emotional price is exorbitant.

My own cancer odyssey started about eight years ago and lasted two years. (I’ve been cancer-free for six years now and I’m doing fine, thanks). When I started feeling physically better, I felt the release of an emotional bottleneck. I went to a support group and each of the six people there told the same story: “I’m sure I got cancer for a reason and I just don’t know what it is yet.”

I responded, perhaps inappropriately: “You got cancer because a variety of companies, governments and shareholders decided that clean air, water and food were less important than their money.”

I’m sure everyone in that group was happy I never returned, but it was a great catharsis for me. At that moment, as an environmentalist working with business, my emotional self met my professional self on very clear terms. I realized we must begin including the environmental costs – including environment-related health costs – in every financial transaction.

Consider this: last year, the US spent $37bn on cancer drugs and over $100bn on cancer treatment alone. Those numbers don’t include the unreported and uncovered costs, such as nurses, acupuncture, psychotherapy, personal travel, supplements and caregivers’ expenses. I spent many thousands of dollars in such costs for

Forbes’ Inspiring Social Entrepreneur Ideas

This Forbes website list of inspiring social entrepreneur ideas highlights Amy’s proposal for accelerated depreciation for green infrastructure. See more of her thoughts on the issue here.

From the Forbes list:

#3. Corporations harm the environment but many don’t want to. Amy Larkin, author of Environmental Debt: The Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy explained the connection between the growing environmental crisis and global economics. She noted that many corporations want to invest in clean tech, but choose not to because of the short term financial pain—even though many green investments have positive long term financial impacts. She advocated specifically for accelerated depreciation for green infrastructure investments to incentivize, really enable, corporations to invest in reducing the environmental harm.

Climate change survival: companies need courage… and new metrics

First published in the Guardian on April 24th, 2014.

Today, tremendous work is being done to develop the metrics of natural capital. All kinds of very smart people and organizations are making the “business case” for sustainability, making tortuous calculations as they analyze the life cycles, carbon production and water footprints of a variety of products, all in an attempt to make the best possible business and marketing choices.

This arduous work is being done – finally – by gifted and smart accountants, economists and supply chain and manufacturing experts, from the Global Reporting Initiative to the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board to the Carbon Disclosure Project to the World Bank’sNatural Capital Accounting. I appreciate all of this work. We need it.

But, impressive as this work is, it is no replacement for having the courage to actually contemplate the state of the world around us. Right now, we are looking on with a mix of disbelief and ennui as extreme weather engulfs us. In some cases, we are trying to take what appear to be reasonable steps, mostly in order to protect our precarious perch in the world’s economy. The trouble is, the time for reasonable has passed. We have somehow forgotten that if there is no nature, there is no business.

We are in a global environmental emergency, but we are behaving as if incremental improvements to “business as usual” will do. Talk to a scientist, a fisherman, a native of a low-lying island or a farmer stymied by drought, heat or floods. Or for that matter, talk to anyone who has been flooded in southern England or Pakistan; or who is making flood