Not accounting for the environment can hurt the bottom line: ACF
As stereotypes go, you don’t get more thorough and bottom-line obsessed than a member of Australia’s banking and finance industry. Like ‘em or despise them, big financial institutions and their employees are respected for at least getting the bottom line right. But are they forgetting to plug certain figures into the equation when they loan money to other corporations? Well according to a new report by the Australian Conservation Foundation, banks do it all the time. The report “False profits: how Australia’s finance sector undervalues the environment and what we can do about it” says the environment is often overlooked to the detriment of these institutions’ financial returns. The author of the report is Charles Berger, and the Wire asked him what ACF was hoping to achieve through its publication.