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1. Introduction
The Brundtland Report (UNWCED, 1987) brought the notions of sustainability and sustainable development to widespread attention, and has gained a ubiquitous currency in policy, business and education circles with the continued development of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015), the planetary boundary concept (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015) and NGO reports (WWF, 2016). The student-led protest Fridays for Future has also highlighted that sustainable development is a crucial concern for younger generations (fridaysforfuture.org). Over the last 50 years, few issues have been more deserving of our attention as scholars and citizens than that of the ecological sustainability. Regardless of the arguments in this paper, the problems with the planet's environment are unequivocal and urgent. With few exceptions, the data show that we are accelerating in the wrong direction (Rockström et al., 2009; WWF, 2016). Whether it be climate change, species extinction, pollution, water availability and waste or resource use, global indicators paint a severe and bleak picture (WWF et al., 2020; UNDP, 2020; UN GA, 2015). We may know little else, but we know that humanity is currently acting unsustainably. Together with its complex and contested implications for society, justice and equality, these environmental issues will determine little less than whether or not humanity has a future and, if so, what sort of future that might be.
The importance of sustainability for the planetary future is now recognised (at least in principle) as a necessary criterion of human decision-making. Industry, the public sector, companies, accounting and financial markets are all substantively implicated in and affected by sustainability (Schmidheiny and BCSD, 1992; ICAEW, 2004; Hopwood et al., 2010; Unerman et al., 2007, 2018). There is no question that many organisations have responded to and exhibited leadership in various environmental and social issues. While organisations have implemented a wide range of developments from recycling to pollution reduction, from eco-efficiency to responsible care, from resource substitutions to green energy technologies – these efforts have proven insufficient as global sustainability problems have continued to worsen. Equally, various strands of the accounting profession have developed significant initiatives in environmental management accounting, such as the recognition of environmental risks and liabilities, the development of standards for stand-alone reporting, auditing...