Biodiversity and Ecosystem Accounting

"Businesses play a central role today in the processes leading to ecosystem degradation, and as such are increasingly called upon to contribute to their protection. How, then, can we improve businesses’ consideration of biodiversity issues and their involvement in the localized management of ecosystems? Furthermore, while conservation science and ecology offer a growing number of indicators and data to assess biodiversity in its many forms, how should this information be structured so that it provides a basis for strategic and collective action and for dialogue among stakeholders?"

An approach based on ecological accounting as a discipline within management sciences allows us to address these issues regarding the structuring of ecological indicators and information systems, the assumption of responsibility by the various actors who interact with ecosystems, and the associated forms of accountability.

The field of ecological accounting and its recent developments regarding biodiversity aim to transform the accounting systems traditionally used by firms to better account for the value of natural capital (biodiversity, ecosystems), thereby embedding it at the heart of management processes at various levels of corporate governance. Innovation in ecological accounting also exists at other levels (national, ecosystem-wide) and can thus help create linkages across different scales of ecosystem governance.

Interactive lectures are interspersed with exercises of varying lengths that engage students actively:

- reading and lively discussion of scientific articles in the field;

- a tool for the comparative analysis of natural capital accounting tools and models, etc.

-A tutorial on applying ecosystem accounting approaches based on a case study "

"By the end of the module, students will be able to identify and compare various accounting models and tools applied to biodiversity at the corporate, ecosystem management, and national levels. They will be able to apply key concepts in the field of social and environmental accounting, as well as the underlying logic of some of the proposed tools and models, to analyze the challenges of structuring information (ecological, economic, social, etc.) for the ecological management of firms and ecosystems."

The intended learning objectives are as follows:

- Be able to list and define the key concepts and summarize the theoretical characteristics of social and environmental accounting approaches, highlighting the specific elements they contribute to addressing environmental issues.

- Be able to identify several key questions and distinguish the major trends shaping the field.

- Be able to identify and compare different approaches, models, and tools for biodiversity accounting used by various entities (companies, government).

- Be able to explain the key challenges of ecosystem-scale accounting approaches and how they complement accounting systems developed at other scales.

- Know how to use the “ecological contribution accounts” model to organize information for the collective management of an ecosystem, based on a hypothetical case.

No prior knowledge of accounting in the strict sense of the term is required to take this module.

Comprehensive ongoing assessment: 100%