SMEs' place in the journey to sustainability

EVERY year, the accounting community in the country tends to latch on to one or two trendy business topics. You'll notice it by how frequent a subject is being offered as a webinar session by several accounting organizations over a given period. A "hot" talking point as of late is sustainability in business. And with the rising effects of anthropogenic climate change affecting most Philippine businesses on a yearly basis, it's really about time that it is one.

Sustainability, in the corporate sense, refers to doing business without negatively impacting the environment and society while still earning enough revenue to remain financially viable for the long term. Many governments around the world have made sustainability in business a priority for them to achieve their own climate change commitments. This usually involves requiring companies — usually large publicly traded ones — to disclose their environmental, social and governance (ESG) data in an effort to make these companies adopt sustainability goals and practices into their core business models.