Going beyond number crunching and providing assurance, advisory, and tax services to their clients, accounting firm Isla Lipana & Co./PricewaterhouseCoopers has embarked on a new challenge — helping save earth from further environmental degradation.
Armed not with calculators and spreadsheets, but with their environmentalist’s caps, partners, managers and staff stepped out of their offices to contribute their share in the global effort to reduce greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
“What does an accounting firm have to do with the climate change effort? Like the rest of the world, we believe that we should perform simple but significant tasks to somehow help protect the environment from further destruction,” Isla Lipana chairman and senior partner Tammy H. Lipana said.
The first step toward the objective was to work with the klima Climate Change Center, a unit of the Manila Observatory which raises public awareness and trains individuals and institutions on climate change issues.
Isla Lipana is the first accounting firm to request the klima Climate Change Center to give its people a briefing on the science, impact, and solutions to climate change.
“It is a first for klima to partner with an accounting and auditing firm to promote awareness on climate change. The lecture was conducted prior to a tree-potting activity to familiarize the employees with the basics of climate change. This is just the beginning of Isla Lipana’s environmental activities. In the next few years, climate change will be the focus of their corporate social responsibility program,” Emmi B. Capili of klima said.
Capili and other speakers including Angela Consuelo Ibay of klima, Dr. Rosa Perez of the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), and Dr. Rodel Lasco of the International Centre for Research on Agro-Forestry (ICRAF)– Philippines briefed over a hundred Isla Lipana partners and accountants on various facets of climate change. PAGASA and ICRAF are research partners of the Manila Observatory.
After the lectures, they got close to the earth for a tree-potting activity at the La Mesa Ecopark where Lipana headed the potting of 220 ipil seeds. Planting trees, according to klima, is one effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
This, Lipana said, is not a short-term program. A culture of environmentalism is what the accounting firm will strive to achieve through simple steps such as using mugs instead of paper cups in the office, and recycling used paper into memo pads. The company also held a Christmas décor contest using recyclable material to encourage the re-use of waste materials among its employees. Another activity is the showing of the popular documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” for which Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize.
“We want every Isla Lipana employee to fully appreciate the problem, and to embrace the culture of environmentalism that we have initiated, so we can then work on sharing what we know with our clients, and the beneficiaries of our corporate social responsibility projects,” Lipana said. The accounting firm also plans to reach out to other communities to teach the basics of climate change.
One concrete step the company will take is to reduce its carbon footprint by encouraging what is called a low carbon diet — an innovative klima initiative which aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions on a personal level through conservation, and the efficient use if energy. Using paper wisely, conserving electricity, and recycling garbage, are only some ways to reduce personal carbon dioxide consumption. The firm will implement this with the help of klima, with the support of its host institution, the Manila Observatory. Save Planet Earth is Isla Lipana’s campaign toward taking bigger steps to a low carbon diet objective.
Playing a different kind of numbers game, Isla Lipana’s green accountants are counting the ways by which they can save the environment at least one simple but meaningful step at a time.