Business strategies to counter climate change risks to long lived production assets

Abstract

The business community is concerned about how to account for long-lived production assets in an era of climate change. Globally, accounting standards and guidance are emerging but these are yet to provide the level of clarity required by the business and accounting profession on the uncertainty of future climate and how this can compromise some long-lived assets. Very few organisations have the necessary expertise and data to integrate climate change scenarios into their long-lived production asset accounting. This poses an additional risk to business and society. We explore different approaches for including risk and uncertainty in business accounting and reporting. Seven desk-based case studies of emerging practice in the food sector demonstrate how these varied climate risk and uncertainty models for infrastructure are being deployed around the world. Through review of data from company annual reports, documents and websites from 2021 to 2023, we find that specific climate-impacted long-lived asset accounting is relatively rare, notwithstanding that risk and uncertainty models are in effective use in other emerging areas. We provide recommendations on the development of data and modelling frameworks for climate-related financial data and an improved accounting discipline for climate-related financial impacts.