The four pillars of the ICAS sustainability strategy

ICAS aims to be a leading voice on sustainability issues across the accountancy profession.

We’re committed to embedding sustainability across our syllabus and training courses, including new electives and new continuing professional development (CPD) activities.

We also aim to reach net zero through our operations by 2045.

Our 2030 strategy pledges: “We’ll embrace our net zero future and place equality, diversity and inclusion at the heart of everything we do.

“We’ll drive social change in the profession, by supporting talent from less-advantaged backgrounds and growing the reach and capability of the ICAS Foundation.

“We’ll create a sustainable, future-looking, 21st century professional body that continues to invest in our vision and the profession.”

To deliver our ambitions, we plan to deliver sustainability through four “pillars”.

1) Advocacy and influence

We aim to be a trusted voice with government, standard setters, regulators, businesses and our own members.

In recent years there has been a focus on the set of standards being produced by the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), along with the European standards from EFRAG, and, to some extent, developments in the US with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

There’s an ongoing debate between the use of single materiality (what is financially material to the company) and double materiality (which also considers the impact of the company) in sustainability reporting.

At ICAS we advocate the use of double materiality and mandatory reporting for certain entities, but we appreciate that may not happen overnight.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has been working on standards, which incorporate impact, for 25 years. We see great scope for GRI standards to have ongoing and increasing alignment with what ’s happening at the ISSB – such interoperability is helpful and will facilitate reporting per double materiality through applying both standards. What we don’t want is for companies to be overburdened by having to report under multiple frameworks.

2) Learning and training

As these new standards are published, we need to make sure that our members and our new students coming through the ICAS CA training programme are equipped to understand and deal with the evolving sustainability issues including data collection and analysis to inform business decisions, as well as disclosures. .

To deliver relevant training we have recently updated our curriculum. We understand that our existing members sometimes need access to some of this knowledge. We want to build on our existing CPD courses and make sure that knowledge is always being kept up-to-date.

3) Social change

We are working with the ICAS Foundation, along with a couple of other organisations - including the Rise Initiative. 

This entails engaging with children in schools to raise awareness of accountancy as a profession and the role that they could play in it.

Coupled with that, we also have a strong focus on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) within ICAS, and we support our members with EDI matters through our toolkit. We want to make sure the profession is truly reflective of society at large.

4) Leading by example

ICAS cannot stand up and talk about any of this without being able to answer the question of what we are doing to get our own house in order.

We have developed our own net-zero strategy, which has been approved by the ICAS Council to achieve net zero by 2045.

That’s mainly going to include working with suppliers in our supply chain, which represent the largest portion of our emissions, being “scope three” emissions relating to the goods and services that we purchase and use.