Accounting for climate change

Dr Anne Marie Conrath Hargreaves, 2025

When climate-related reporting was on the verge of becoming mandatory worldwide, the accounting profession faced a pressing challenge: graduates were fluent in technical standards but ill-equipped to engage with the socio-ecological realities behind the numbers.

ACX3800/5800 Accounting for Climate Change was created to bridge this gap, shifting education from a narrow transfer of technical knowledge to a critical, reflective practice.

The unit positions students as active change agents, capable of holding organisations to account for their socio-ecological impacts, and as future professionals able to help shape care-based, more desirable futures in the workplaces they join.

Centred on an immersive learning approach, it blends conscientisation through problem-posing classroom work with both virtual and physical experiential environments. Grounded in Freirean dialogical methods, this approach prompts students to question assumptions, “read the world”, and design accounting responses to the grand climate challenges of our time.

Students report that this immersive model boosts their motivation to engage with sustainability-focused accounting, strengthens their ability to apply accounting to nature and biodiversity, and transforms their view of the profession’s role in climate mitigation.

Significantly, the immersive learning approach also fosters equity: international and female students in particular show strong gains in both engagement and skills.

In doing so, the unit helps cultivate a new generation of accounting professionals, equipped not only to meet emerging climate-reporting mandates, but to actively shape them.