What exactly is sustainability, and why should CPAs care about it? Those were two questions Renee Mikalopas-Cassidy, chair of the NYSSCPA’s new Sustainability Committee, posed to its more than 40 members at its inaugural meeting in January. Committee members ranged from people who were interested in corporate sustainability but wanted to learn more about it, MikalopasCassidy said, to people like herself who have a background in the topic.

“We’re still feeling out what people know and don’t know, and what they’re interested in,” Mikalopas-Cassidy said, in an interview before the committee’s first meeting.

And that’s important, she said, since, like many other CPAs who have been watching sustainability evolve from an environmentalist’s buzzword into a new method of management accounting, the committee’s work has the potential of having an impact on not only how the term is defined, but also on how it’s implemented.

“Right now, it is very evolving, and unless you’ve been in a multinational big company, by and large, you probably haven’t seen a lot of this,” she added.

Mervyn E. King, who has been an active and primary advocate of sustainability accounting since the early 2000s, defined sustainability in a recent interview with the NYSSCPA in this way: “‘Sustainable’ for corporations is used in its morphed sense. In its primary sense, it means maintaining something, but the word is now also being used in the context of sustainable capitalism, that is, the creation of value but in a sustainable manner—meaning enhancing the positive impacts of how the company makes its money on society and the environment, and eradicating or ameliorating the negative impacts.”

Since the committee is addressing a very broad and somewhat nebulous topic, Mikalopas-Cassidy focused the committee’s first meeting on how CPAs can take a leadership role in this new method of management accounting.

“This is something that, whether you’re in public or private accounting, you need to be aware of and have an understanding of what its impact is,” she said.

In an effort to tackle a lot of ground quickly, Mikalopas-Cassidy said the committee formed six subcommittees, including SEC Sustainability Disclosures, GAAP/IFRS/ AICPA Sustainability, SASB Development, Evolving Legal Matters, Evolving Educational Matters in Sustainability, and Sustainability 101. She also remarked that the committee might create others in the future, since there was also interest in addressing tax and regional issues through the lens of sustainability.

The second meeting, which took place on March 8, was devoted to examining the types of things that sustainability reporting looks at and measures. Using PepsiCo’s Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) report, Performance with Purpose, as an example, Mikalopas-Cassidy said the committee examined how the company disclosed its environmental, social and labor impact.

Beyond discussing how the CPA profession can influence the corporate sustainability world, the committee will also focus on how concepts in corporate sustainability are germane to the profession. For example, committee member Edward Mendlowitz, who is on the Sustainability 101 Subcommittee, said that many large corporations have published sustainability reports that explain their activities and their impact on the environment. Someone has to prepare these reports, he said, and accountants should be the ones to do it. Currently, this role differs based on the particular corporation. In some companies, marketing and communications personnel handle the compiling of these reports. Past the numbers, he said that CPAs should also be able to write the narrative aspects of the report as well, adding that it falls well within their skill set.

“We write all the notes to the financial statements,” he said.

Mendlowitz compared sustainability to transfer price studies, which quickly became a very lucrative field for CPA firms that had positioned themselves on the ground floor as the ones who should be doing them. This is why he feels it’s especially important for younger people to take an interest in corporate sustainability, saying that it’s a tremendous opportunity for young professionals.

Another committee member, Frank J. Aquilino, an associate professor at Montclair State University and also a member of the Sustainability 101 Subcommittee, agreed.

“The people out there now, professionally, are not used to this, but if the younger people are educated [in] it from the get-go at the college level, they will come out [prepared for it],” he said.

This is why he felt it was imperative that accounting education programs work sustainability into their curriculums at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. While he has made efforts to do that at his own institution, he remarked that he felt frustrated by a lack of dedicated teaching material, which makes it hard to communicate the core concepts to his students.

“Right now, the only way to do it is having them do outside research and read articles concerning it and write a report and discuss how it impacts different companies,” he said.

In response to this dearth of educational material, Mikalopas-Cassidy said that the Sustainability 101 Subcommittee has begun to develop a CPE program that goes over the fundamentals of sustainability reporting. While it will eventually be presented at a future meeting, she said that it is meant to be a stand-alone unit that can be presented anywhere.

Once the committee develops a regular rhythm, Mikalopas-Cassidy said that she’d like meetings to focus on a combination of subcommittee reports, which will cover the more general topics, and speakers, who can do deep dives into specialized areas.

The committee is also helping to coordinate the Foundation for Accounting Education’s (FAE) First Annual Sustainability Investment Leadership Conference, which is scheduled for May 6. The all-day event will feature talks and panelists including King himself; AICPA CEO Barry C. Melancon, who currently chairs the International Integrated Reporting Council, a position previously held by King beginning in 2010 as founding chair; founding chair of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board Robert G. Eccles; and Jane Gleeson-White, whose book Six Capitals: The Revolution Capitalism Has to Have—or Can Accountants Save the Planet? called for a holistic approach to corporate sustainability. NYSSCPA Executive Director and CEO Joanne S. Barry is also slated to speak at the conference.