Financial Reporting for Environmental and Social responsibility: A Normative Strategic Concept

Corporate responsibility demands that firms address environmental and social values in their firm’s policy and key performance indicators. These are integrated through strategic planning and require firms to merge the longer term environmental and social values with short term economic objectives and performance measures. Each firm’s strategy will differ. This paper provides a normative reporting concept to connect the financial implications associated with longer term planning for environmental and social values, with short term accounting reports. Reporting variants adapted from total cost assessment, life cycle costing, variable costing are integrated to offer upstream information based on a product segment view.Strategy, environmental reporting, life cycle costing, cost systems, multi-period accounting, multi-stage fixed costs.

Sensitive Design

I contend that the architecture we produce should be a framework that is informed by our senses in order to create an experience for the user to better utilize and live in a space

Study of the influence of physical, chemical and biological conditions that influence the deterioration and protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage

Two wrecks related to the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) were studied. Following the guidelines of the UNESCO-2001 Convention for the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, a holistic and interdisciplinary approach based on the development of four of the thirty-six Rules of this international agreement was applied. A non-destructive survey technique was developed to obtain information from the scattered cannons and anchors without altering their condition (Rule 4). The work performed provided information about the origin of both wrecks, the Fougueux and the Bucentaure, two ships of the line of the French Navy, and allowed to characterize the state of conservation at each site without jeopardizing their future conservation in the marine environment. In addition, measurements of the main physical, chemical and biological variables allowed correlating the conservation status at each site with the marine environmental conditions (Rule 15). Thus, in Fougueux shipwreck large iron objects are corroding at a higher rate (between 0.180 and 0.246 mmpy) due to high sediment remobilization and transport induced by waves at this site, causing damage by direct mechanical effect on metallic material and by removing the layer of corrosion products developed on the artefacts. Meanwhile artillery on Bucentaure site, covered with thick layers of biological concretion, is well preserved, with lower corrosion rates (0.073 to 0.126 mmpy), and archaeological information is guaranteed. Finally, the effectiveness of the cathodic protection as a temporary measure for in situ conservation (Rule 1) was evaluated on a cannon. The use of a sacrificial anode after 9 months reduced the average corrosion rate (from 0.103 to 0.064 mmpy) and the percent of corrosion rate in 37.9%. These results are very useful for developing a decision making system of the Site Management Program, based on predictive models of artefacts permanence and risk factors in the marine environment (Rule 25)

Reported social and environmental taxonomies: a longer-term glimpse

The purpose of this study is to identify the taxonomies, and the quality and quantity of environmental and social information disclosed in the annual reports of Australian firms. Using content analysis, and the broad categories of the Global Reporting Initiative as interpretive guidelines, the study examines the information disclosed in the annual reports of 187 firms listed on the Australian stock exchange over a five-year period. The findings from logistic regression interconnect the firm's categorical imperatives with their reporting of sustainability issues and key performance indicators. The results suggest a considerable reporting improvement is warranted to support user confidence in the representation, the understandability and comparability of social and environmental information. Accountability and a systemic trust by users in the information reported necessitate these qualitative characteristics form part of the reporting process. The content used to communicate the environmental and social outcomes resulting from a firm's operations has increasingly become aligned to a disclosure strategy, that is, an indication of management imperatives. These results provide pragmatic insights in the disclosure of particular environmental and social classifications in the annual report, and indirectly into management reporting imperatives. Limitations to this research are: the subjective aspects associated with the use of content analysis and the use of logistic regression does not provide a causal relationship between variables, it only provides an interaction